


Zero

by galadrieljones



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Backstory, Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Existential Angst, F/M, First Love, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, Love Triangles, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-03-31 05:48:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13968672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galadrieljones/pseuds/galadrieljones
Summary: Nil, of all people, serves as the remarkable constant in Aloy's otherwise turbulent existence.





	1. Zero

**Author's Note:**

> Latest Update (9/3) - [Chapter 10: Apple](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13968672/chapters/36887172)

Sometimes, she would meet him in cold places. By accident, always. Though lately it had begun to feel like providence. He had a penchant for boozing hard in the evenings, but he was well-spoken even still. He knew a great deal about history and about the Mad Sun-King. A soft and melancholy drunk, he told good stories until he had too much. Once she found him staring into his own reflection in a river by the side of an old Nora outpost in the Sacred Lands. He was drawing shapes in the water and they had been traveling together for two days on their way to the Gatelands.

“Have I come to this river for cold water, Aloy?” he said to her. “I forget, but I am thirsty.”

“Then drink,” she said. 

He obeyed.

Tonight, they were camped shallow in the Sundom, in a cool valley somewhere close to a lake where the soil was all red. He’d passed out while they were looking at the moon and drinking rye whiskey he had distilled himself in a barrel. She helped him back to camp. He was a little drunk, and she sort of nudged him into his bedroll and he was a big man with broad shoulders, but she was strong, and he was so grateful.

“You are the warmest body I have known in some time,” he said. He looked at her in the golden light off the lantern in the tent. There was a moth buzzing in there. He made no move to touch her, or to pull her close to him. That was not his way. It had been innocent. He just liked being with her, walking along the roads, sharing a tent, sharing a fire, sharing his booze, and killing the bandits, and that was seemingly enough.

When he fell back asleep, Aloy went back to the lake and the red soil, watching the Snapmaws, and she thought about what he’d said, and she felt a swelling distance between the girl she had become and the thing she thought she was raised to be. Outcast. Drinking the rest of the rye, it tasted like acid, but it made her feel boldly present in this small moment in which he slept, peaceful, away from her, but still near. In his own way, Nil was all fucked up, a fucked up sort of guy. She knew this in her guts. But he was good to _her_. He trusted _her_ , and for all of her ego, she trusted him, too. Aloy’s whole situation made her feel separate from the world, and he was there with her, this fucked up guy. But who cared? All the “mothers” back in the Embrace, they were just using her. Or they needed her to do things for them. Or they wouldn’t believe her, no matter what she said. They had ruined her life. They didn’t take care of her. She was not theirs. They spat on her. She was on this journey for herself, and aside from Nil, she was alone.

Her mother was a mountain. It almost served to make her laugh these days, months beyond the Proving while drinking rye whiskey on this cold, cold night. So far from the Embrace. Her mother was a mountain, and her father was an outcast, and he wasn’t really even her father anyway, and he was dead. She missed Rost. She missed the smell of his leathers, and his tobacco in their lonely hut. How he had used to make these little paper dolls and they would do shadow puppets, and he had different voices for all of them as he told her stories of forgotten times and heroes.

She was getting drunker now. The world was quiet. She lie down on her back in the weeds, and she closed her eyes, and she found comfort now in the thought of Nil. She had little else in the way of a constant. His affection for her was earnest. She did not need his protection in the wild, but she liked the idea that he offered it anyway, that she had this friend in him, and that sometimes it felt like more, but that was a foreign animal to Aloy that she didn’t know quite how to approach, and unlike machines or bandits or evil, evil men, she was not fearless in the face of her attraction to Nil. It was new, unexplained. And he was chivalrous despite his violent nature, and she never felt unsafe in his presence, and he was handsome and probably a little older? And that was about all she could figure out. For now.

He smelled like the mint he would crush into the mortar. He made salves for healing and he had begun to smell of their restorative properties. Gray Omen and Hintergold. Mint and dandelion, and like wet soil filled with earth worms. They were traveling together to the Gatelands. They were going to kill the bandits there, and then Aloy was going to Meridian, and she knew they’d be apart for a while. But still, she thought about Nil. How he liked to be the one to put the tent together at the end of the day while she built the fire. He knew how to braid hair, and this was curious. Aloy could barely braid hair but Nil—a man of his conviction in the scope of battle—also had a proper way about him, and he knew how to braid hair and to exist in this way that was so distant from her understanding it could only be described as metropolitan.

And yet, he was sad. A sad Carja man. He got drunk to forget. She did, too. She watched the moon and felt herself dulling out. She spent so much time chasing, her whole life devoted to answers so that she rarely sat still long enough to think about the questions. Who was she? Where did she come from, and where did she belong. This nothing, this nobody girl. She was nothing and nobody. Zero, nil.

The coincidence was not lost on her. She didn’t know but she was pretty sure it was this that drew her to him in the first place. She fell asleep in the moonlight by the lake while the Watchers lurked in the high grasses overhead, but she woke up in the tent the next morning. He must have come out and found her there in the middle of the night. He had carried her in from the cold while she slept, and he was so soft in his touch, she did not wake.


	2. Driftless

They met again at the Shattered Kiln. More happenstance. It was freezing, and raining, and night. Aloy was headed to Maker’s End, but the wind went deep. Having been to Meridian now, she felt strangely spun as many threads meticulously woven, but there was a loose piece, somewhere. She knew she did not belong. The people were too loud and she’d had to swear at the merchants to get them to back off her shit. Rost had made a music box for her once, and it reminded her of her own self-sufficiency, and how the city wanted to suck that from her bones. He had showed her how the gears worked, and the levers, and he had also shown her the secrets of weaving and of sewing and the loom. Because she missed him so much, somewhere outside Lone Light, she had got herself a nice, sturdy Strider for a mount and named it Sickle. She was going in circles, and it was a lonely terrain in the Sundom. Now, the rain made everything look the same, like the days were lasting longer. She felt wild, like a feral beast.

It looked like he had been camped under that overhang for days. He had clay pitchers of water and the air and fabrics of the tent wreaked of tobacco and there were some pieces of clothing folded in a pile and many empty bottles lined up all in a row by the side of the bedroll. The weather had not been kind to anyone that week. When it wasn’t raining it was dust storms. That meant a lot of hiding in the canyons. When she saw him that night, nursing his fire in the darkness, dressed down to his slacks and an undershirt, shielded from the rain by the heavy outcropping of rock, she immediately felt consumed by her loneliness, as if she had only just realized. She wanted to cry with relief. But he looked up, and he smiled a crinkled smile, so she didn’t. He had been waiting for her, he said, like he always said, and she wanted to be somewhere closer, like maybe inside his arms, but she held it all back. She nodded instead, because that was what she knew, and she felt her cheeks burn even in the chill from the storm outside.

When they sat down at the fire that night and Aloy took off her jacket to dry her freckled shoulders, he put a piece of wet hair behind her ear, a casual and quotidian gesture. He smiled as the rain fell onto the outcropping overhead and in the valley below, and then he looked at his hands. “You’ve been walking on the edge of life and death, Aloy. I can tell.”

“How can you tell?”

“It is an instinct. That’s all I can explain.”

He didn’t ask her any questions about her life, and they sat down with their knees pulled up and talked about the bandits instead. How many there were, their operation here.

“They’re moving booze,” he said. “There’s a lot inside those spiked walls.”

He asked her what she wanted to do.

“I’m tired,” said Aloy. “I’ve been riding for a long time.” She tossed a pebble into the fire. “Let’s wait until tomorrow.”

“Sure. They’re not going anywhere,” he said.

“Are there prisoners?”

“Two Oseram travelers, maybe three,” he said. “They’ll survive.”

“Good,” said Aloy. “Are you out of everything? My bones feel like ice.”

“I’ve always got something,” he said. He reached behind him and produced a flask. “It’s moonshine, and it will rot your guts from the inside out, slowly. If you catch what I’m saying.”

She shrugged. “Happenstance then, that we’ve hunted booze-running bandits. Hand it over.”

After a few sips she could feel the warmth spreading inside her like one of those deranged metal flowers that bloomed in far away places, usually where many people had died. “So,” she said after a little while, elbows resting on her knees. Nil had leaned back on one elbow. A few Watchers had moved into the canyon—you could see their lights—but they were on a loop in the near distance. Aloy and Nil were camouflaged.

“What did you think of Meridian?” said Nil. He took a long sip from the flask. It was getting lighter. “Are you a big city girl now?”

“I thought it was loud,” said Aloy, yanking a piece of grass from the earth. “And rude.”

He laughed. His laugh sounded a little like gravel. “That is accurate,” he said. “I never thought you’d fit in there.”

“Are all of those people like you?”

“Not really, Aloy. Some of them may look like me, but we are not the same.”

“I’ve learned some things, too. Other—things.”

“Like what?”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

He shifted toward her, gave her a long, serious look. His hair was down and damp and there were little tight curls forming at his temples. “Sometimes,” he said. “Did you see a ghost, Aloy?”

“Maybe,” she said. She spread her palms out and pressed them to the soil. It was cool, even this close to the fire. “I thought I saw my mother.”

He studied her. “Your mother.”

“Nobody knows if she’s dead,” she said. She almost told him about how she was on her way to Maker’s End, and about the stranger’s voice in her focus, but she decided against it. Once he was a part of all that, he was no longer _this—_ escape. “I think I’ll find out soon.”

“Do you need help?”

She looked at him. He was earnest there in the light from the fire. It was the first time he had ever asked her that. “No,” she said. “But thank you, Nil.”

“You’re welcome.” He drank. He passed her the flask. Outside, they could hear Aloy’s Strider, Sickle, huming and grazing in the rain. Thunder boomed low and hard in the distance.

They slept in their bedrolls inside the tent, beside one another as the rain continued to fall. It made tapping sounds on the earth and the river and inside of Aloy’s brain and heart so that she woke up again and again without ever really drifting deeply enough to dream. Nil slept hard with his face on the pillow beside her. She watched his chest rise and fall and it comforted her. At one point, she grew brave and placed her hand there, right on his heart, for just a moment and felt him moving beneath her. _You are the warmest body I have known in some time._ What did that mean? She thought about the moment she would have to leave him again. She removed her hand and Nil did not wake.

She drifted off for good just before dawn, the rain easing off and Sickle still humming, wide awake in her robot bliss by the fire. Aloy had designated Sickle as a girl. She knew robots couldn’t really be anything other than robots, but she wanted a friend who was a girl. She’d never had one. She could feel herself growing attached to all of these drifting entities—ghosts, robots, men. As she slept, finally, she dreamed only of reality on repeat. Arrows nocked, arrows out the bow. It was a bleak, continuous motion. Her knuckles ached, and she was hungry in the dream. You’d think she would dream of Rost, or of the music box, or the phantom woman in the holographic picture. But she did not have that luxury.

Soon the rain eased off, and it was a yellow, stuffy morning. There were lots of bugs, and when she woke, Aloy was alone in the tent and this was all disorienting. As she pushed off the covers in her bedroll and reached for her hairbrush, she heard a sudden rustling outside by where the fire had been. Assuming it was Nil, she got up and pulled back the leather flap and said his name.

But as she stepped out of the tent, she realized that this wasn't Nil at all. It was a stranger—a man with a long, white mask pushed back on his head and his broken nose exposed to the sunlight. He was rifling through Nil’s things, and Nil was nowhere to be found, and when the stranger saw her, he drew a blunt shiv from his waist and took a swipe at her throat. Aloy ducked out of the way and kicked the man to his knees and broke his neck with little regret or hesitation. He lie there, and Sickle came stupidly with her yellow light on, having sensed the unrest, and Aloy stood, looking down at the dead man—this dead bandit who had wandered too far away from his camp and into the lair of what any smart individual would have labeled only as a predator. She had killed so many. Aloy felt cold and sat down to stare at the corner of his boot and where it met the drying soil. She waited for Nil.

When he got back, he was angry. He had been gathering firewood. He hauled the man’s body off the edge of the valley and into the river. The rapids sucked him under, headfirst. Nil was shirtless in the new sun of the day other than the straps that held his bow and his spear in place on his back. He had peculiar tattoos on his arms and between his shoulder blades—not unlike those beneath his eyes.

"Men are stupid, Aloy," he told her, and he spat into the dirt. "This sort of idiocy is the way of survival for many—but not in our camp."

"What do you mean?"

“Little is more sacred in this short, unhappy life than the whisper of a domicile,” he said, as they watched the bandit float away in the water below. “No matter how makeshift.” He looked at her, and he was very serious. Sometimes, he could get so serious, it scared her—but in this strange way that felt protective in its wildness. He was a man who could not be tamed by city walls, and she could feel it. A feral beast. Or was he? “We will move our camp and hunt the bandits at dusk.”

“How, then, are we any different, Nil? They raid our camp, we raid theirs.”

“Because,” he said as he cracked his knuckles. “I don’t know about me, but you’re a hero, Aloy. You save lives. That is your reason for being, and that man tried to kill you where you sleep. The scales need balancing.”

She did not know that he was right. She did not know her reason for being, but she did not argue after that. He talked good. He always had. Plus, the line between escape and refuge was slim, she was learning. They spent the day together, moving their tent and all of their belongings piece by piece to another overhang, deeper in the valley. They had to kill three Scrappers to claim the clearing, but it was worth it, and then it was theirs.

“Home sweet home,” said Nil, and he smiled and poured them both some of that moonshine while Aloy cleaned and dressed a rabbit for dinner. And there they lived, in their hour of preparation before the assault. It was sort of a joke, she thought. But it wasn’t.


	3. Borderlands

After she finished with the Grave Hoard she took Sickle back to Mother’s Crown and got a room above the tavern for four days. It was stripped to the studs but they had warm milk and hot soup, and she was sick of the rangy creatures she’d been eating in the wild. In a small way it felt fraudulent but it was not for long. What came next, she wasn’t ready for that and she wanted to grease her hinges a little and also she needed to get back to Erend.

In Meridian the second time she had met Avad the Sun-King, and he had been handsome in the same way as Nil. She thought about that now. Every time he spoke she saw Nil and his little eye tattoos and the expansive chest as a plank. But Avad was high up, and he smelled perfumed and this defied her understanding of men. She asked him point blank what he used on his skin and he proceeded to tell her about the chemical formulas of personal hygiene. Meanwhile, Nil just crushed the aloe in his enormous paws and smoothed it into his hair because it felt good. She knew he would be nearby, anytime she was in the Sundom. He would never set foot in the city but he would lurk nearby, because he knew she would keep going back there. And she knew that he was tracking her, somehow, along with the bandits, and this was enough.

 _I hear you have a companion,_ Avad had said to her the night she spent in the guest wing of the Palace of the Sun in Meridian. They were having dinner in a grand dining room with golden wallpaper and servants whooshing around on all sides. Some sort of clean and unappetizing white fish _. A man who goes by the name of Nil._

Aloy looked up. She was wearing a bright blue silk blouse, given to her by a personal handmaiden she had not requested, poking at a pearl onion with the tines of her shiny fork. _I see you've got feelers everywhere,_ she said, bristling. _If you're going to spy on me, Avad, at least have the courtesy not to tell me about it._

 _I would never presume to spy on you, Aloy._ He dabbed at his mouth with a cloth napkin _. The reports came independent of my orders. It's more about keeping tabs on criminals._

 _Reformed criminals,_ said Aloy, her eyes feeling very mean that day _. Nil served his time._

Avad seemed troubled, and also surprised that she knew so much. He nodded, in deference. He had a soft voice that made him seem like a soft man, but no soft man kills his father, Aloy knew by now. No matter how evil that motherfucker might have been. Avad was not a soft man _. That is true,_ he said, _I meant no offense, Aloy._

 _None taken,_ she said.

 

Back in the Embrace now she felt like losing her guts. After she left Mother’s Crown, She took a long detour back to her old house where she looked at Rost’s grave for an hour and cried and wondered how the fuck she was ever going to get past this. Sometimes she wondered if it was all meaningless bullshit, and maybe she should just stay here and rot and knit sweaters and be like that old lady Grata and never leave and just sit mumbling at the sky until the day she finally just tipped over into the snow chill and died. But then she remembered the machines and the devil’s voice in her focus, and it made her curl up again and physically shake out her head, and she knew it was a story bigger than her own, and this felt like a trap. She was trapped inside this journey, and there was nothing she could do. She tossed rocks off the cliff and tried to feel close to the old days. But they were getting farther and farther away, even as she sat with her back to the hut where she grew up. Growing up. How many times had she done that now? Or had she done it at all?

She wiped her cheeks and she slept, and then she saddled up Sickle in the early pink dawn and she road for the Sundom once again. Fuck this place, she thought, but she was going anyway. The Carja and all of their baubles. She didn’t know who she disdained more: the Carja or the Oseram or the Nora. The Oseram worked hard but their pride and provincial bullshit was almost as insufferable as the Carja and their shiny silverware. She felt no allegiance to the Nora. This much was now true. And their dull loyalty to a mother who had not served her at all now made Aloy laugh. She could feel herself entering a numb state in which she felt superior to everybody else. It was distasteful and she knew it was wrong and that it would pass. But for now it enabled her to soldier forward without second thought and without regret.

In any case, it was gonna take weeks but she needed to get to Pitchcliff. There was a human element here, and that went beyond Aloy’s ego and her hardened sensibilities. At least she thought it did. She had left Erend waiting for a long time, and he was probably already there, but he also knew she was a fucking spark on the wind, and he expected nothing more and nothing less, but she couldn’t do it to him anymore. Make him wait. He was a drunkard just like all the others, just like her on some nights, and even though he was not soft, he was not hard either, and she saw what all this instability with his personal life did to him. He stood proudly, tending to Avad, but he was not Avad. In fact, she preferred him to Avad, because at least he did not put on airs. He was a fuck-up who got by on his bluster and bravery and in the way he swung his axe alone. But he knew this. He made no excuses for the thing he had become or for the questionable measures he had taken to get there.

She tried hard not to think about Nil as she traversed the burnt out landscapes of the Borderlands. She ate mostly berries and the stringy, tough meat of rabbits and missed the hot food back at Mother's Crown, but this was temporary. She would have to sleep way high up in the canopy cliffs to avoid all the constant activity of the crazed machines, their in-fighting and the wandering cultists, and she even managed to override a Sawtooth to oversee her guard at night. She didn’t give the Sawtooth a name. When she left it, she knew the Ravagers would not be far off, and she knew they’d rip that Sawtooth limb from metal limb, and she did not want to ride away knowing she had abandoned to death something that had a name.

Sickle was a good friend. Aloy had been messing with her programming a little bit and she seemed to be getting smarter. She knew how to bring back rabbits without burning them up and she would stand quietly now as if pleased whenever Aloy would pet her metallic mane. She had sharper senses. She had grown protective. If only robots could feel, thought Aloy. And she would count all the different ways she might one day be happy.

 

When she finally got to Pitchcliff, she left Sickle to graze outside, and the guy she was looking for was dead and she was getting so damn sick of the irony she stuck her spear into the earth and fell to one knee and closed her eyes.

Erend didn’t understand. “Somebody beat us to him,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Shit.”

“He made a map, with his own blood,” Aloy said with her eyes closed. “See?”

“Where?”

“Look.”  

He knelt down beside her. He saw it now. His vision was always temporarily blurred, and he was always one step behind because he was ruled by his emotions. His only concern was his sister. She thought about Avad then and the way he spoke of Nil as if he knew him. Keeping tabs on criminals, he’d said. What an asshole. Aloy wanted to scream. The upright thrones of men and revered mothers annoyed her to the end of the world. Everybody rubbing scented oils into their skins so they could smell like nature but they had removed themselves from nature long ago. But not Nil. She tried not to think about Nil. She thought about winter instead. She thought about the Embrace, even if she no longer had a home there. She thought about Sickle and her blue light.

 

They couldn’t save Ersa. Aloy had got clipped in the shoulder by an arrow, and Erend helped her remove it right after the battle, and then he tied it off for her to staunch the bleeding. He watched to make sure she was okay, no matter how she urged him forward. He was tender in these moments. A lot of give. But Aloy had a lot of drugs and salves and things given to her by Nil and by the weird merchants of Meridian that would ease off the pain. She’d heal quickly, she told him. "Don't worry, Erend." Once they got down into that basement place with Ersa, Erend’s retching filled the space with such sorrow, and it was all an invention of his grief now once she was dead. This whole journey. Aloy turned around. She was bruised and battered, and she went back upstairs to give him his privacy, and she went outside, and she saw that it had begun to snow. She looked up and the sky was almost too bright to see. It hurt her eyes. The snow fell on the bodies of the Oseram mercenaries who had killed Erend’s sister. It fell on the machines and their dead body parts, and for just a moment, everything was freezing cold and very clean, and that was all.

She thought of Nil. And this time, she did not push the thought away.

It was always a surprise, and yet it wasn't, finding him anywhere, she thought. Most of all in the back of her mind where he seemed to hide out quite often, rearing his head when she least expected it and needed him most.

Listening to Erend cry his tears in a basement dungeon while nature raged on through the mountains in the form of the falling snow, Aloy went back to Pitchcliff, but when she got there, it was a terrible sight. She found that Sickle had been shot down by a flock of Glinthawks, and she didn’t know what to do at first, because it was such a shock, and her instinct was to fix, but the atmosphere was psychotic, and there were metal birds and then the Oseram warriors everywhere demanding she help them, but there was blood in her eyes, and they couldn’t give her a reason why.

“Fuck _off_ ,” she said as one of them grabbed her arm.

“Look to the skies, Nora.”

“FUCK OFF.” She threw him to the earth, glared.

But one of the Glinthawks got into her view then, and it was so fucking loud, she took it down out of sheer annoyance. A few ropes and three arrows. That’s all it took. She removed its heart with extreme speed and precision while all the world screamed in her peripheral vision, and she tossed it to that screaming Oseram who didn’t know what to do with it and why the fuck she had given it to him at all amidst the chaos, and in that moment she was satisfied by his ignorance, and she said, “Sell it. Or are you that useless?” Then she wiped her tears and ran away to rip the hearts from as many metal birds as she could with that stupid Oseram still screaming at her back, holding that dumb piece of metal in his hands, like a child, fixated.

It took a while to finish the flock. There had been at least six total, and then the skies were quiet. The smoke rose from the earth. As soon as it all cleared and everybody was out there picking up the scrap and assessing the dead, Aloy was finally able to comb through the battlefield and salvage the pieces of Sickle. She dragged them to a cave in the side of a ravine, all by herself, as nobody offered to help her, and once there she assessed all the problems and their roots, but no matter how she tried in her tearful haste, she could not reconstruct her friend. There was too much missing. The wires were burnt out and crispy. The blue light shattered. She gave up when she accidentally burned her knuckles on something red and hot inside, and the sear made her yelp in pain. She shook out her hand, brought her knuckles to her lips, and she felt so defeated by her false hopes, and by all the men out there and their preening, and in her own defeat, she cried.

She left Sickle in the cave, eventually. The soil was too hard and cold to bury her, but Aloy still marked the plot with a bare, dark stone, and she rigged the entrance with a tripwire. As she left, the Mayor of Pitchcliff tried to reason with her, to make her stay, but she was done. _More will come,_ he pleaded, as if this was somehow her problem. But she shoved him off of her and told him to learn. _Learn,_ she said, and she pointed a finger in his face. He was shocked by this. He was a man and much older than even Rost had been, but he was weak. She did not care. The inane stupidity of a people who claimed such dominion over metal, and yet they could not even defend their own holds?—this made Aloy sick. _Learn_ , she said. Learn. She’d meant it. It was the Oseram who had killed Ersa. In all of their pain leftover from the Red Raids, pieces of them had gone mad. Soft. And everything was so complicated and mixed up by now, and all of the factions were killers. She held allegiance to none of them in the end. She left that place, and she would never go back, and she began her journey to Meridian. Her shoulder hurt, and her bones and all of her muscles were sore. She needed to help Erend, because she had promised she would, and because he had helped her. He had tied off her shoulder and offered her comfort in a far away cold place where his sister then died, and this was compassion. As she traveled, she refused to take another Strider out of respect for Sickle and made herself suffer on foot. She kept an eye out for signs of Nil, but there were none to be found.

She camped often. She took many breaks. She tried to stay as high up as she could so as to avoid the psychotic machines of the Borderlands. Everything in the Borderlands seemed so much worse than it was everywhere else. How could this be?

 _Where are you_ , Aloy said to herself while she sat by the fire on the grassy escarpments above the river, all alone, somewhere north of Cut-Cliffs while the Snapmaws lurked in the swamps. Her feet ached. She cried some more. She closed her eyes and couldn’t eat, and she tried not to think about her dead robot. She tried to feel the snow.


	4. Keep

Sick of people, Aloy went out and found the river. She looked up at the moon and the world all felt like glass. She threw some rocks into the water and they made ripples. She had taken off all of her armor and left it at the Palace of the Sun, and now she was free against the night in cotton clothing with nothing but her bow, and when she placed her palm against the earth she felt its coolness and she closed her eyes.

Avad had been very desperate in the wake of Dervahl. He had been weak and stupid with Aloy, anticipating that his mantle as King would determine their fate together. He was grieving intensely. Aloy could see it, though he was tightly held within himself, his stoicism so pure it reminded her of Rost’s. Like a sickness. He had been lovers with Ersa. He didn’t say this directly but men don’t grieve like that otherwise, and while Aloy had never been lovers with anyone she had known closeness. She tried to sense that now. She had left the Palace of the Sun because Avad had desired her company, and she could not make promises to a grieving man. Out here, she had a view of the Striders on the other side of the river, sifting around in the grass, and it had been almost three weeks since Sickle. The fog of her death had cleared and now she was just a kind but sad memory.

Back at the Palace, before she had left, Aloy unbraided her hair and left it down so that she could feel the ends of it brushing against her back and shoulders. She was crouched low, breathing in the medicinal hintergold of the riverbank when she heard him—his voice coming from a little ways up the river.

"Aloy."

It was Nil. She glanced and she remembered how he had told her he would find her in Meridian but that seemed so far away now, like a different lifetime, and she was so surprised, she didn’t even have the presence of mind to run to him. She just stood, waiting as he came to her, smiling because she lived, and because he must have known that she lived, because news traveled fast in the Sundom, and he was a very good listener, but Nil was a pessimist. She knew that he needed to see things to believe them.

When he got right up close, he had a net full of nighttime fish. Some of them were still alive and squirming around. He looked serious and relieved. He dropped the net, and it was very wet and splashed her feet and her knees, and some of the fish slapped around and found their way out and back into the water and swam away. He was just wearing a cotton shirt—gray or brown, she couldn’t tell in the dark, and some simple trousers and heavy boots on his feet, and his Carja tattoos were barely visible on his forearms and his face and his neck, and he had a large spear she had never seen before slung over his shoulder on a strap. "Your hair," he said. "No braids today." He tucked the loose hair behind her ear. A familiar gesture that let her know she was no longer alone, but she had not seen him in weeks. Maybe almost two months? She couldn't be sure. The sensation was like an anchor, though, waking from a dream, and the moon was behind him, covering them both with its silver light, and she, lost in the hypnosis of the moment, and washed of her grief, somehow, like those stupid fish in the river, placed her palms on his cheeks, and she stood as high up on her tip-toes as she could, and she kissed him.

It was a surprise, cool, and soft. Nil was taken off guard. He nearly stumbled, but he did not resist. Another stoic man, he tended to use humor to deflect his pain, but in that moment, once he realized what had happened, he allowed himself to unravel, and his lips parted on an instinct to kiss her back. It felt normal. He picked up his heavy hands, didn’t know what to do with them at first. It had been a very long time since he’d kissed a woman. He set them on her lower back, so gently because he did not wish to handle her as he handled so many of the outside, brutish things in life. She tasted like faraway lands, and like home. He sensed her, feeling her way against him, sort of clumsy but still assertive—and he let go of something big, something heavy inside as they kissed by the light of the moon beside the river, outside the gates of Meridian Village in the Sundom. So close to the place where he was born.

When they parted, finally, and the kiss was over, Aloy seemed lost, exhilarated. The sight of her was enough to undo him, so he squeezed his eyes shut, and he shook out his head like a dog to get his bearings back. He brushed his thumb past her chin, and he took a deep breath. He opened his eyes. He studied her, searching for something. Some explanation that he could make sense of. Was she drunk? Sad? He couldn’t see anything. He could only see her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her cheeks were pink.

“You’re sorry?”

“I should have asked first.” She looked away. She looked at the ground. He followed her eyes to the place where their boots touched the soil and stood very close to each other.

“You should have asked to kiss me?”

“Yes. I should have. Was it okay to kiss you?”

This amused him, but he could hear the seriousness in her voice. “It’s okay,” he said. He nudged her chin so that he could look her in the eye, and he laughed. “It’s okay, Aloy."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

She smiled at this, a little shy. But then she started crying. It was out of nowhere. It concerned him. He had seen her flustered but he had never seen her cry. She tried to suck it back but it was useless in front of him. He could hear the Striders buzzing behind them in the valley. All their stupid blue lights, casting shadows on the grass.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

She sniffled once, wiped her tears on the back of her hand. “Nothing.”

“Aloy.”

She took a deep breath. “Sickle’s gone,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“A flock of Glinthawks, in Pitchcliff. I couldn’t fix her.”

It took him a moment to realize what she’d said. That Sickle was dead. The Strider was dead. But once he figured it out and how deep it seemed to have gotten and he remembered how long they had been apart, he became remorseful. “I’m sorry, Aloy.”

“I’d been messing with her a little bit, you know? She’d gotten smarter. It was just really ugly.”

“You will move on,” he said, putting that stray hair behind her ear again. “One day, and you will find another Strider to call your own.”

She smiled, blinked down at the grass. He could feel her—the optimism. She was not a dour girl. She had just been handed dour circumstances. “Thank you, Nil.”

“I heard about Dervahl. And Ersa,” he said.

This seemed to interest her. “Did you know them?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I remember them, from the uprising. But they were on the the other side. I never saw them up close.”

“I think that Avad and Ersa were lovers,” she said. “I think this whole thing has really screwed him up. He’s not right. I’m worried.”

“Avad will survive,” he said. He took a piece of hair out of her mouth. He sighed and for a moment, allowed himself to become vulnerable. “That is what he does.”

“Do you know _him_?”

“That is an old story, Aloy.”

“You won’t tell me?”

“One day,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

She sighed. She didn’t care that much, he could see. Avad was the sort of man who liked the soft female sensibility and sought it out wherever he could for his own validation. Nil knew he would have come on to Aloy, as she is pretty but strong and she held compassion deep in her heart. But she was too hard for him. She would not allow him these frivolities and she would see his grief for what it was and she held no pretenses for men or what they meant to her behind the moment. He knew that he filled some sort of void for her but what it was he did not yet know. He did not feel worthy of her company in this way but he, like her, also held compassion deep inside his heart from an old life in an old way, when he was a boy in the village and the world was not so mean to him and to his family. And he liked being with her, and her touch comforted him, and he would take from her only what she offered to him, as that was his way.

Somewhere nearby, they could hear a rabbit or something, rooting around in the foliage. He felt her hand on his. “My camp is up the river,” he said, “but I think you should get back to the Palace. Avad is taken with drama, and he will likely cause a sensation if you go missing.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I know.”

“I will be here.”

“Why don’t you come inside the city?”

“I am not welcome inside the city.”

“How?” she said. “You are absolved. Whatever happened, Nil, that’s the past.”

“You sleep in the Palace,” he said. “You are a revered guest of the Sun-King. I won’t take that from you. I am an outcast, Aloy. By choice, or not. I won't test those waters.”

“You think I don’t know what that means? To be an outcast?” she said.

“I think you do know what it means,” he said, “and that is why you understand why I must stay here and you must return to the Palace.”

She sighed. She scuffed her boot across the dirt, annoyed. “Fine,” she said.

“Are you—do you know what you have to do next, Aloy?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’m not ready. I can’t, Nil. Not yet.”

“Fine,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“Can we talk more tomorrow?”

“Yes,” he said. “I will be here.”

“I’ll come at night,” she said, so serious. And then she threw her arms around his neck, held him tightly, very fast, until her toes left the earth. She was so light? He had carried her and been close to her but this was something else. Then, she whispered, "I don't know what to do. Is it different now? Did I change things?"

It was so strange. She was so strange, but it felt true. She was talking about the kiss. "No," he said. He felt grateful and undeserving like a whirlwind. He pushed the hair out of her face. "And yes. I don't know. We can figure it out tomorrow."

"Okay," she said. She smiled, low and pressed her forehead to his chest, just for a moment. Her hair was a little frizzy with the humidity of the night, and it was getting in his nose. She smelled just like Aloy—just like this girl that he knew and then he felt all the old fears bubbling up in his brain about what he wanted, and what he deserved. Nil was far away outside himself and he had been living there for years. What he did not know yet was that Aloy understood this. If there was anything she truly knew, it was a life of deflection and the difficult measures one must sometimes take just to let people in.

 

Once she was gone, Nil picked up his net, half the fish wriggled away, and he threw it over his shoulder and went back to his camp. He’d found a little overhang right up against the water, and it was safe enough around here with all the Carja patrols that the more aggressive machines kept their distance. They mostly left him alone. It was not illegal to camp in the outlands. Once or twice he thought he’d seen a familiar face in the week or so he’d been loitering around the village. He went in a couple times for supplies—mostly for booze. The barmaid looked like a girl he’d known from childhood but she did not seem to register his face the way he registered hers. Sometimes, Nil’s whole life felt like an invention of his imagination and in those days he had begun to question which parts of it were real, and which were not. Other than Aloy.

When he got back to his tent, he kicked off his boots and lie on his back beside the fire and looked at the stars. He was not tired and sort of wished he had something to do other than bide his time. He thought of hunting. He thought of just going out to kill machines because he felt like it. And because they were there and they were a challenge. But he was also euphoric and taking a moment to stew in his marginal confusion. Part of living outside yourself means denying the pleasures in life that make the self stronger. Aloy had kissed him, and that had put certain values into perspective, and thrown others out of wack. Would he have gone into the woods that night, hunting aggressive shit robots like the Sawtooth or the Stalker if Aloy had not touched her mouth to his? Probably. His hesitation spoke to a man with something to lose and he did not know what that felt like. He had not felt this in many years, and in truth, never for a single woman so strongly. It was like being a child. His helplessness in the face of his and her mortality was beginning to show, but it was the reason he was camped out here, outside Meridian in the first place. Wasn’t it? Waiting for her. Would he be doing this if she were just a partner? A drinking buddy. He didn’t think so.

After a little time went by, he began to hear movement on the other side of the ledge, in the clearing. He knew the sounds of machines, and this wasn’t it. It wasn’t Aloy either. He had the sound of her footsteps memorized. No. It was men, an organized group of them, and they had stopped nearby and now a single set of footsteps approached. Nil sat up and grabbed his spear. He did not move. He just sat, holding it tightly, his eyes cast straight ahead with his peripheral vision waling hard into his brainspace. The footsteps approached on the right. They did not sound secretive or hurried. Nil loosened his grip and finally turned his head to see who it was—who had come here.

It was Avad, disguised in a heavy cloak, followed by ten or eleven Vanguard soldiers holding spears and torches. But they stayed back, way out of earshot, as this was not an ambush or an arrest, it would seem, but a personal visit from the Sun-King himself.

Nil was relieved, but also annoyed and a little confused. He sighed and tossed his spear and did not stand. “Avad,” he said. “I wondered what it might take for you to leave the city walls. Apparently, it’s me.”

“Hello, Nil,” said Avad.

“How did you find me?”

“By observing Aloy.”

Nil laughed to himself, rolled his eyes. “You’d better hope she doesn’t find out. She doesn’t take kindly to deception.”

“Does anyone?” said Avad, standing there. He put his hood back and looked at the fire. Nil didn’t get it at first, what he was doing there. Thought it must have had something to do with him. But he saw it then, the soft of Avad’s eyes and how it looked as if he had been crying.

“Why are you here,” said Nil.

“Are you her lover?” said Avad, giving him a long, careful look. He seemed surprised, disappointed, even saddened. “I didn’t know. Am I wrong?”

Nil squared up his shoulders, a little unhinged inside at the thought of being watched in the wild. The question was highly unexpected. “I’m certain that what I am or am not has nothing to do with you, Avad. Not anymore.”

“I understand that,” said Avad, crouching now by the fire. “I just wanted to know.”

“Why?” said Nil. He did not like deception either, though he had come to expect it in ways that Aloy had no way of experiencing. “So that you may calibrate how you might proceed?” he said. “Aloy told me about you and Ersa. I didn’t know that. It’s not a good time, Avad. You need to grieve.”

“Nobody knew about Ersa,” said Avad. He tossed a pebble into the fire. “Well, almost nobody. Anyway, it had just been a very long time since I last saw you. I wanted to see for myself, and as Aloy has proven to be a valuable ally, to understand the company she keeps. In any capacity.”

“A valuable ally. Is that all?” said Nil.

“Excuse me?”

"You’re too curious, Avad.”

“That is a misinterpretation, Nil.”

“Perhaps,” said Nil. “But here you are, inquiring about my affairs with a mutual friend who happens to be a woman. I know you.”

“You know what.”

“How you keep them,” said Nil. He plucked a reed from the grass, placed it between his teeth. “How you always have. _Prince Avad_. It is important for you to keep women. Am I wrong?”

“Of course not,” said Avad. “I am not ashamed of this, and I know my reputation. Though I disapprove of your choice of words. I _keep_ no one. No woman I’ve ever loved has been the _kept_ -type.”

Nil laughed. “Love is a very small word with a very big meaning, Avad. You’re out of your element. And if I were you, I would reexamine what you’re doing _here_. Are you in love with Aloy? Even as the last woman you supposedly loved is barely cold in the earth after she died protecting your life?”

“That is enough.”

Nil ignored him. “The good Sun-King of the good Sundom should not spy on his allies,” he said, “nor should he pay nocturnal visits to war criminals outside the city walls. Not unless he has a very good reason.”

“ _Reformed_ war criminals,” said Avad, strong, perfect courage, glancing at Nil in the yellow firelight. “Aloy reminded me of that.” He stood up then, dusted his hands together. “I’m not here to argue, or to talk about Ersa or Aloy. Whatever happened between us, Nil, that is the past. I came here to tell you that you are free to enter the city. You have my full pardon. No one will give you trouble, I will see to it.”

“The city?” Nil said. “What would I want with Meridian? And why would I warrant your sponsorship now, after all these years? Because of Aloy? Your _ally_?”

“It is only an offer,” said Avad. He put his hood up and clasped his hands in front of him, a man made of high chivalry and etiquette but too romantic and easy prey for a wordsmith like Nil. “A simple offer to an old friend.”

Nil thought on it. He spat in the weeds out of habit, discarding the reed. He was thirsty and he was feeling on the edge of something and it was taking him out of his euphoria and this was bothersome. “Thank you,” he said.

“I’ll take my leave,” said Avad.

"As you should," said Nil.

After he and his ten men left, Nil lie back down and closed his eyes. He wanted to get back to that place he’d been before, his pleasant confusion on the topic of Aloy. But Avad’s visit had been disruptive and it threw a wrench in all this, and it put him in a bad mood. He was searching, searching. He got up and armored and he took his bow and his spear and he went out into the wilderness to play his game. At the end of the day, this was what he understood and perhaps it would get him back to the thing he needed in the first place. The thing that drew him to the peculiar Nora girl with the big heart and terrifying demeanor, and the way she made him feel. As he put his spear into the wired throat of a Stalker in the high, red weeds, and he listened to its life whirring out of existence he felt his anger leaving him. Aloy’s red hair was like a natural born camouflage in this place, he thought as he wiped the machine oil from his blade, blending her into the terrain almost as if it were made just for her. And when he finished his work in the wilderness that night, and it was nearly dawn, he went back to his camp on the river, and he took a long, hard drink of something, and he put his head on the pillow, and he slept. The fire was cold. The sun was warm. He slept harder than he had in some time knowing that whatever it was or whatever it would turn out to be and for all the stupidity and hubris of Avad, for the moment, Nil had something to look forward to.


	5. History

In the morning, Aloy woke up, and the room was cold. The window to her very high bedroom had somehow unlatched in the night, and it now swung on its hinges, and the blue curtains were moving with the wind. She got up to close it, and after, she took in the full gold of her surroundings, and how it felt both deserved but also wholly unfitting for her to be sleeping in such a pretty place. Back home, some called her a savior, where others still refused to utter her name for fear of inciting their own eternal damnation. In the Sundom, if she was not revered, then she was a fierce enemy, and this made her feel a tingling sensation in her palms and in the back of her neck, like her hairs were standing up—a kind of power that she’d so rarely felt in her small Nora life. She had not realized, at first, that she’d been followed out to Nil’s camp the night before, but she figured it out once she got back to the castle. Avad had been absent his typical nightly routine of reading in solitude on the ramparts, and she remembered royal Vanguard soldiers hanging around in the village, and this was not a typical sight. His months-earlier tip that he’d had her scoped out in the wild had drawn her suspicion in a very particular way. She knew the moment she’d returned that he’d been out there, watching.

So as she stood in her gold room with the chilly blue curtains on one of the highest floors of the Palace of the Sun in Meridian, she became intensely curious. She didn’t have a personal history yet, not really, so far as she had experienced life. All of her history, she could tell—she was experiencing it _right now._ The fact that Nil had a history that preceded her, and that it might have something to do with Avad, and the idea of him being the man she knew and then a young man and then a boy in the world without her—it was infuriating, but in a good way. Avad had left the castle the night before, but he had not approached her, so she knew he must have been looking for Nil, and Nil had made certain remarks to predict as such, and now she needed to know why.

She got dressed in the pretty silk blouse laid out for her by her own personally designated handmaiden, and she brushed her hair as good as she knew how. As she did it, and she was looking in the mirror, she thought about that handmaiden and how her name was Jesse, and how the night before, right before Aloy went out to the river where she ran into Nil, Jesse had asked Aloy if she would like her to brush her hair. Aloy became confused and annoyed by this, and she bristled and said no, and while she hadn’t meant it to be rude, she thought now that she probably overreacted as Jesse turned very red and quiet and went away for a long time. But Aloy’s hair—it was like nettles? She was only doing Jesse a favor, she thought. _Nobody wants to brush this shit,_ she thought to herself. _Not even me._

She went to the Royal Library on the twelfth floor. It was a new installation by Avad himself and had never been there before his reign, and inside were many golden shelves of books, very old and very new, and the aisles were all patrolled by little old ladies and men with deep hunches in their backs and little spectacles on silver chains hanging around their shriveled necks. Aloy was shy to this world, and she rebuffed any offer of their help, and she whooshed through the aisles on her own, making sense of the room’s organization until she found her way to a section on the modern history of Meridian nobility, the Mad Sun-King, the Red Raids.

She discovered four books that interested her—the last of which was just dedicated to notable battles during the end of the Mad Sun-King’s particular reign. She knew that Nil had fought for Avad’s father, but that it had not been a political or even moral affiliation. He held no allegiance to the Mad Sun-King, nor to Meridian or the Carja way he once knew. She had no idea where he had come from to determine his place in the war, but if he knew Avad, this had to mean something _big_. She didn’t even know how old he was, but she had gleaned off Erend at the tavern several nights before that Avad was twenty-six, and so she thought that probably Nil was somewhere around the same. That seemed right. So she would not have to look back very far—his history was deeper than her own, and it was a secret and oddly jagged in nature, but it was still very new to this world. She was confident that she would find _something._

Rost had taught Aloy to read. The focus had been an interesting help, but it had been Rost with the letters and the numbers and the brass tacks of knowledge. He had a lot, and he was good with words even though he spoke so few to anybody but her. She had books and stacks of parchment that she would practice with. That day, in the library of the Sun Palace of Meridian, she was a little slow at first, out of practice, as the dialects and vocabularies of the Carja scholars in these library books were arcane, but she picked up fast. She enjoyed the freedom of reading. She enjoyed the freedom of her safety in the current moment. She knew that it could not go on forever, but she was trying to experience this day for what it was, as she knew that, once she left this place, it might be a very long time before she returned to such a nest of creature comforts and predictability.

She became thirsty at one point and went to get a glass of water. A young woman with a shiny tray and a heavy brass pitcher poured some water for her at a table by the high arched door, and she had her face covered up to the eyes with a lovely piece of tulle or something like it. She smelled of magnolia bushes, like the kind back home. Aloy had the sudden suspicion that the girl was a spy, and when she returned to her table, she had no way of knowing whether it was true, but she found Avad, leaning over workspace, both of his hands on the marble tabletop, studying the things she had been studying only moments before. He was dressed in his high garb of Kings, but he looked very tired in his eyes. When she got back to the table, he straightened up sort of awkwardly as if he were holding his breath. She approached with pointed, outward suspicion, as she wanted him to know that she was onto his shit. But she also had so little to hide from him. What would any of it matter, in the end? If he knew about Nil. What even was Nil? Her friend. Her friend who she had kissed in the moonlight by the river.

“Aloy,” said Avad. “I thought this research must be yours. I see my predictions are confirmed.”

“Your girl by the door,” she said, taking a sip of her water. “Was she watching me for you?”

“Of course not,” said Avad, understanding. He flexed his jaw, looked back down at the books, clasped his hands behind his back. “I see you’ve taken an interest in my father.”

“Not really,” said Aloy. “Just one of his battles from a long time ago.”

“Which?” said Avad, curious. “If you don’t mind my asking. I could be of some assistance. As you may know.”

She gave him a long look, sat back down at the table, set her cup far away from the pages so as not to spill and cause a sensation. “Cinnebar Sands,” she said. She entertained him, his notion to assist her. Avad sat down at the table beside her, smelling of his perfumed musk and smoking tobacco, and she pushed an open book across the table, in front of him. As she did this, she heard whispers on all sides. A Nora girl sharing books with the Sun-King—it must have been a sight for their shriveled, Carja eyes to see.

“Cinnebar Sands?” said Avad.

“It sounds like one of the worst battles in Jiran’s war,” said Aloy, pushing the hair out of her face. “It says here there were no survivors, but in some of these other books, it says there are. Which is true?”

Avad sighed, studying the words as if he himself had written them. “Several men survived,” he said. “But their minds were shredded by what had occurred there. They asked that their names be forgotten.”

“What occurred?”

“What do you think?”

Aloy thought about it, her brain growing heavy and soft. "Machines," she said.

Avad nodded, resigned. “A lot of good men died," he said. He folded the book closed, marking the page with a bit of gold thread. He became very serious. "Aloy."

“What?” she said.

“I know you're angry with me."

“I am?”

“Your looks, your distance. What have I done?”

Aloy took a deep breath. She didn’t want to get into it. She wanted to leave the city now all of a sudden. Find a deep ravine and go swimming for days. “You followed me, last night,” she said. “Out of the palace. Didn’t you?”

He bit down, looking away, but he did not lie. He nodded, once. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was hoping to run into an old friend.”

“You mean Nil.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard Nil talking,” she said. “In his sleep. And sometimes, he lets things slip. When he told me about his time in Jiran’s war, he mentioned Cinnebar Sands. He dreams of it.”

“You must ask Nil.”

“How do you know him?” she said. “Just tell me.”

“Why does it matter?” said Avad, studying his knuckles. They were well kept, but the skin, no matter how clean, was scarred pink and shiny. “Why do you care, Aloy?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I’m just—curious.”

“Then, as I said, you must ask him.”

“I did, and he gave me nothing.”

“Then nothing is his to give,” said Avad. He stood from the table, turned around. His back, high and broad, angered her, but she knew she had no right to any of this.

She sighed and set her forehead down on the book in front of her. She closed her eyes. She thought about Sickle, because sometimes, it was these little thoughts that calmed her most. Flowers growing in her memory. “I’m sorry,” she said, remembering, too, what Avad had been through. “I know it’s not my place.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Avad, glancing at her, over his shoulder. “Perhaps I am mistaken. I have no way of…understanding, and I apologize for my bluntness. Nil’s never been a forthcoming person. Not even when we were kids. He hid it all, very close to his vest, behind his wit.”

“When you were kids?” said Aloy, looking up at him.

He turned around one more time, fussed with the rings on his fingers, took them all off and put them in his pocket. The scars were more prominent now, louder and newer seeming. “Nil’s father was friends with my father,” said Avad, eyes cast to the stacks of books on the table. “This is all I will tell you, because it is more or less known if you're in the right circles. His father fought for mine in the Vanguard. Nil's mother was just a seamstress, a dressmaker. But she made a lot of my mother’s clothes—her favorite headdresses and scarves and silk gloves and all that. And because of all this, his family moved from Meridian Village to Sunfall. We were maybe five or six when we met? He spent a lot of time at the Palace, Aloy. That's all. We’ve been—we _were_ friends for many years.” He looked away again. In the room, then, you could smell coffee. It was a big presence and it filled the aisles with a lovely, caramel warmth. "His parents have both since passed."

“What happened?” said Aloy.

Avad turned his back to her. She could count the metal feathers weighing down his back and shoulders. She thought the garb of a King should be softer, but she also thought she didn’t know too well what it meant for him, and all of its representation in the wake of his father’s death. “I've said too much already,” he said. “I must take my leave.”

“Wait,” said Aloy. She stood from the table, filled with a strange kind of empathy and gratitude. He was a somber man, and he was not the man she thought he was.

“Yes?” he said, but he had already taken a few steps toward the girl with the tulle face-covering at the door, and he did not look back.

Aloy almost lost her footing. She became awkward and stupid-feeling—it was an old sensation that she thought she’d rid of some time ago. Apparently not. “Thanks,” she said simply. “For telling me. It helps.”

“You’re welcome, Aloy,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “Though my admission stands that you must ask him all you seek. In any case, you might like to know that your initial suspicions were correct.”

“Which suspicions?”

“Nil was at the skirmish of Cinnebar Sands.”

“He was?”

“Yes,” said Avad, clenching and unclenching his fists, watching out for their familiar tremor. “As was I.”

He went away then, left the library, and the girl with the tulle left the brass water pitcher and followed him through the high, magical archway into the hall. Aloy felt like an asshole and kind of far away from her own compassion, and so she closed her books one by one, and she put them back all by herself, and then she went back to her room, pensive and full of confusion, and that is where she found her handmaiden, Jesse, in waiting, reading a book by the window.

Jesse rose promptly when Aloy entered, closed her book and set it on the velvet cushion. “My lady,” she said, hurried.

Aloy sighed. Aloy clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them once more. She looked at the girl who must have been a few years younger than even she was. Barely more than a child, and still weary to the world of palaces in ways that Aloy knew now meant more than gold rooms and spires, and she was only doing her duty. Aloy took a deep breath. She made a choice, or perhaps several. In any case, she approached Jesse and crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey Jesse. Would you, uh—would you like to brush my hair?” she said, sort of smiling, though she felt idiotic. It was okay.

The handmaiden, however, filled with pink light and became overjoyed and picked up the heavy silver hairbrush from the vanity. “Yes,” she said. “Come, sit.”

Aloy smiled and obeyed. She sat stiffly and looked out the window while Jesse the handmaiden worked the brush through her maniacal hair.

“What are we preparing you for, my lady?” she said. Then, she seemed to shake out her head, laugh a little. “I mean, _Aloy._ King Avad said you just like to be called Aloy.”

Outside, through the window, the world was a blanched out color. It was a hot day. She could already feel it in her blood. “I’m leaving,” she said.

“The palace?” said Jesse.

“Meridian,” said Aloy.

Jesse caught a tangle, tugged against Aloy’s scalp, apologized profusely. But Aloy hardly felt it. Pain is relative. She just counted the birds against the hazed-over sky and waited.

 

Meanwhile, Nil had caught wind of a new crop of bandits, patched together out in the foothills—the word escaping a couple travelers who had come through the Maizelands looking to sell expensive, though partially-mangled machine parts. Oseram with blunt spears and stupid looks on their faces. At the tavern, Nil bartered for a couple bottles of whiskey and a cut of dried meat and a loaf of bread. The bar girl had eyes for him. She was a mild Carja beauty born in the backwater. He could see it in the color of her teeth. She offered him a bag of golden apples, free of charge, and he took advantage of her affection and nodded in gratitude.

“My best to Aloy,” she said then, earnestly, as he got up from the barstool. It was a surprise.

“You know Aloy?” he said.

“I met her once. She’s hard to miss and very nice. A little odd, but she came into the tavern and left a big tip.”

Nil started laughing. “That sounds like her,” he said. “I’ll tell her you say hello.”

She smiled. The goodness of people still sometimes came as a shock, but he was getting better.

He began his trek in the late morning, left a note for Aloy embedded in a hunk of tanned leather right where his camp had been. He had been idle for a while, and the bandits were a calling, and he knew how to leave trails and notes that only she could read and follow. It was a part of their thing. He thought of her as he went, entering the dense forests on his own, but the feelings came only in tiny, warm glimpses, as that was all he would allow himself. He saw the backs of her knees, her red hair, the particular freckles on the back of her neck and how they’d peek out any time she exposed it to the sun. Her voice always got kind of hoarse in the mornings, as if sleep took a great deal of effort.

Once the glimpses passed, he shut them down. His hands were very dirty as he handled his weaponry. The machines got bigger the further you got from the city. But he knew how he was formidable. He feared very little in the wilderness place of life and death. Deep behind it all, he hoped it was not too much to ask of her now—to follow him to another bandit camp in the trenches. This was how they’d begun, and he sensed that this part of their lives was not over, and he thought it didn’t have to be, but he didn’t know her well enough beyond something so intimate as a kiss, and he knew little of what to expect. But they were still friends, and they were still partners, and she was still Aloy. Somewhere along the line, the lines had blurred, but probably they had blurred long before anyway, and the kiss was just an echo of that, and it all begged to go deeper, but there was no way to sort that out until he saw her again. He could feel himself both running away but also running to the place he knew her best. The tip of the arrow—he thought that would make it all clear, or at least less pressurized, if they could be in their natural habitats—the wild—and this was probably immature and ill advised, but what the fuck did he know anyway? He’d had many women in his time as a decorated warrior for Avad’s father, and as he was little more than a teenager back then, he rarely said no. But he had never really _known_ a woman—or thought about letting one see the other side of his sorrow, not like with Aloy, and he thought about Avad and Ersa, and how Ersa had probably been little more than a royal slave in Sunfall when their friendship began, and this was devastating, and there were all these things he had not known in life, and so in some ways, he felt like an idiot child in spring, stupidly feeling his way through the greenery. He had no real way of knowing what lie ahead, other than bandits.

He thought this had to be normal and good and okay, somehow. He moved on right quick once he found a nice clearing not two miles from the bandit outpost. It had a mountain spring coming down into a lovely ravine, and a good ledge underneath which he wanted to build his tent and his sleeping space. But there were three Sawtooths roaming the area, a herd of Grazers, and three Scrappers sniffing around the edges. The ravine was not deep enough for Snapmaws, but there were Striders in a pack on the other side, hanging around the water’s edge. As he strategized, Aloy naturally receded into his heart where she belonged, and he closed its compartment to protect her and himself, and to focus his cold brain on the killing of killer machines in the dense tropical blistering forests of the west. In doing this, he ensured that he would make it to his destination, build an acceptable domicile to inhabit, and that he would be there and safe when he knew she would inevitably arrive, full of her warmth and pretty smiles and hidden emotions and surprises, and full of answers. Even if she was angry at him, it didn’t matter. She’d been pissed at him before. He’d been pissed at her before. At the end of the day when all was said and done, this clearing was not that far away from Meridian, and the path was clear for her, and he knew that she would come.

He killed them all. The valley was deep, and the foliage was too thick for Glinthawks, and this made it easier. He laid traps for the Sawtooths, picked off the Grazers from the treetops above. The Scrappers he corrupted with his poison arrows, and they killed one another. They sparked and steamed and exploded everywhere, and when it was all over, he hopped down and landed hard with his boots in the grass, and then he crossed the river, and he lured the Striders to their easy, quiet deaths one at a time—all except for one. He left one, grazing and humming by moonlight. Alive. It was out of sight now, and he knew it couldn’t see or hear him once he got back to the clearing. He had spared it for Aloy, just in case. A gift, though he did not view it as such and had made the choice more or less automatically.

He set a reed between his teeth, chewed, surveyed the carnage and his success. He hauled ass and built his tent. He built his fire. He took off his armor. He sat down and hung his head between his knees. The day was gone. The job was past.

In childhood, Nil’s mother had spun a loom in their house where they lived in the village outside Meridian. She made warm blankets of all colors, and she made dresses, too, and this was a part of how he was raised and ingratiated into the world of women and the things they did and the ways they were. It was not about the loom, thought Nil when his mind finally got quiet that night. He gutted one of the Sawtooths for parts, sharpened his spear against the metal haunches. It was the patience, he reminded himself. How she did everything with so much patience—cutting her fruit, spinning her loom. Like a rhythm in his mind now, a constant, beating drum that kept him living when the fighting got finished and the woods felt safe. There she was, in his heart, his dead mother, all flooding together with Aloy.

It was not just about bodies with Aloy, and it never had been. It was more, he knew. When you’re the kind of soldier Nil was, you know what I mean. He hunted a rabbit with precision. He ate a golden apple and bits of scrap from the rabbit he’d cooked on a spit, the moon full. He had picked some berries. He lit a candle made of wax scented with aloe vera. He went over to the ravine, the mountain spring, checked on his lone Strider and its lone blue light, and he filled his flask. He drank water, and he drank some of the booze he’d bartered off the barmaid in the Maizelands, and he regarded the scenery. Pretty—all of it, so fucking beautiful—but crawling with angry metal. It all kept getting in his way, but in the down time, in the spaces between all the death and the metal and the animalistic men, when his mind got quiet in these periods of waiting for Aloy—Nil remembered who he was.


	6. Forgiveness

“He won’t be there,” said the barmaid. She was putting together a nice cup of coffee for Aloy. The tavern had big, wooden walls and low, brass lights, and it was rather crowded for a typical morning in the Maizelands. Somebody was talking like a parade had come to town. New merchants from the Borderlands with new wares, and this got the villagers excited.

“What do you mean?” said Aloy. She had her hands folded on the counter in front of her.

“If you’re going to see brother Nil? He won’t be there. He caught word on some bandits from Oseram travelers. He told me to tell you if you came, and he left a note where his camp used to be. He said it would be a note that only you can read. Whatever that means.”

Aloy got red in her cheeks. She felt the go-between nature of this barmaid and the rest of her life, and it was making her itch. She sighed and rested her chin in her hands. “More bandits,” she said. “Great.”

“Are you surprised?” said the barmaid. She handed Aloy a little cup and saucer. The coffee smelled good. They didn’t have coffee in the Sacred Lands and Aloy was growing used to it here.

“Not really,” said Aloy. “He’s not really the sitting-still type.”

“And neither are you, I take it,” said the barmaid with her green eyes. She introduced herself as Brissa. “I knew Nil as a kid in Meridian Village. I don't know that he remembers me exactly whenever he comes in here. I was a touch younger, but I remember him.”

“Did you know Avad?”

She blushed. She was tall and rangy and beautiful, but she wore a wedding ring and had some ceremonial tattoos on her neck that communicated the rites of a Carja marriage. “No,” she said. “Only Nil knew Prince Avad.”

“Does everybody know Nil? It seems like they do.”

“Not everybody,” said Brissa, smiling. “But many do. None speak of him anymore, of course. They all think he was a betrayer, but I remember what happened in Sunfall, and a lot of us know the truth behind his allegiances.”

“What truth?” said Aloy.

“That his mother was murdered by Oseram mercenaries,” she said, almost casual. She began polishing a glass with an old brown rag. “Mercenaries who later joined Avad’s cause in Meridian. Nil was a teenager. It was a big deal.”

Aloy felt suddenly very far away and cold. “His mother was killed by Oseram?” she said.

“Yes,” said Brissa. She set down the glass and rubbed her eyes. Then she looked right at Aloy, very serious. “He doesn’t talk about it, does he?”

“No,” said Aloy. “He doesn’t.”

Brissa sighed. She seemed unsurprised by this, the fact that Nil had kept it all a secret. “I guess you two just live in the moment then,” she said. She looked up. “Am I right?”

“What does that mean?”

“You both hurt, but you don’t talk about it. Why not?”

“I’m fine,” said Aloy, so quick and so certain, she almost convinced herself.

But Brissa was not so easy. She sort of squinted, leaning over the bar as if she were reading the glyphs of truth on Aloy’s soul. She nodded, once. “Right,” she said, smiling. Then she changed the subject. “When he moved away from Meridian Village, you know, we were all so sad.” She sighed. “He was so cute, and he writes good stories. He used to read them at the campfire and change his voice for all the characters.”

Aloy allowed herself to laugh at this. “Nil?” she said.

“He used to be much happier,” said Brissa. It was a blunt fact as she tended to her nails with a slender file from her pocket. The Carja spoke with a forward measure. They rarely hid their truths and were uncontained with bravado like the Oseram or the Nora. They wore their bravado on their faces in tattoos and ceremonial make-up. They wore it on their head-dresses and elaborate fashions of metal and ceramic plates. “He was light on his feet back then.”

Aloy nodded, feeling a little guilty for some reason.

“Were you ever light on your feet?” said Brissa.

Aloy gave her a look. She pushed the hair off her face and felt suddenly persecuted. “What’s with the interrogation?”

“Nothing,” said Brissa, innocently. Like it was all a joke. “I just get that you’re a warrior-type, and him, too. So _serious._ My brother’s a little like that. Not my husband. He’s a fisherman and he just wears his emotions like jewelry. That is why I love him. But still, working at a bar, I’ve had some practice.”

“I’m not that serious,” said Aloy. “I can be…less serious. And I don’t even know if I’m a warrior. I mean, I’m good at stabbing stuff, if that’s what you mean.”

Brissa laughed at this. “You’ll come around one of these nights, Aloy, and I’ll get you toasted off your ass,” she said. “We can talk about your whole life, and your big handsome lover Nil and his childhood brevity.”

Aloy felt very tense in her face and her neck as she drank her coffee. The room was warm and itchy. She tried to pay with a couple coins before she left but Brissa would hear nothing of it.

 

Afterward, Aloy encountered a distressed man in Brightmarket who had grown worried upon the disappearance of his daughter. It came suddenly, like a big wind in a canyon and took Aloy off guard so that she could not escape him. She’d been busy, walking along the river, gathering up ridgewood for her arrows, trying not to feel both sad and elated at once. She didn’t even see him coming and then suddenly she was involved in his life, and he had a very sad face that made her think of Rost, and then it was too much, and it was in this moment that Aloy felt her heart shut itself away behind a curtain and she began to realize exactly what Brissa had meant about her being a _warrior,_ and she felt annoyed.

The man’s name was Lahavis. He was a diplomat, high born, and he had dealings in the Carja Civil War, and Aloy wondered about his allegiances. His daughter, Elida, had disappeared, and Lahavis was worried that she had taken her own life.

“Why would she do something like that?” said Aloy. They stood by the river, which smelled of medicine. It was late morning, and she had a whole bundle of ridgewood beneath her arm, on her way out to Nil's camp.

But the man looked disheveled. He became uncertain and panicked. “I don’t know. Why would she? She is about your age. Why would a young woman about your age find herself in despair?”

Aloy sighed and didn’t have the answer. “People get sad,” she said. It seemed to be the only true response. She gave in, because the man seemed desperate, and he offered to pay her. “I’ll find Elida.”

“Thank you,” said Lahavis, and then he started to cry and leaned into the railing of the bridge over the river where they talked beneath the rising sun. “You have no idea how grateful I am.”

 

Elida was pretty and mild, and it turned out she had stolen a boat off the Brightmarket docks and rowed it across the canal to an abandoned little island covered in moss. It was hell getting over there. Aloy tracked her to a beach that faced out against the lake, and she was surprised by a Snapmaw, which she killed quickly, but those things were long and evil, and she sustained a kind of bad frostbite to her left arm. She sat swearing and sweaty down the beach from the big, sparking beast and all of its severed electronic impulses. It was dead. “Stupid fucker,” she said as she examined her injury and spat into the sand. She saw a girl then, climbing down from the mesa overhead. This startled Aloy at first, as she was on her guard, but then she noticed the delicate weaving of the girl’s lavender dress, her shiny hair. This was a noble girl, hesitant, and Aloy knew right away that it was Elida, and she sighed with relief, as she assumed this meant her job was complete.

But Elida was atypical in her behavior. She did not speak at first and seemed unwell and frightened. She rushed to her little camp under one of the escarpments in the cliffside, and she rifled through a little hope chest without a word until she found a small covered jar full of a thick salve that Aloy recognized, and then she approached Aloy with the utmost caution.

She held out the jar. “Thank you,” she said, shy. “Here. For your wound.”

Aloy took it without question, staring at her and trying to figure out what to make of this scenario. “Elida?” she said.

“Yes,” said Elida. She then became curious. “Where did you learn to fight like that?”

“Like what?”

“You killed that Snapmaw with just a tripwire and your bow. It was incredibly fast. I thought you were going to die.”

“Oh,” said Aloy. She sighed. She unscrewed the jar and smelled the contents inside. It was hintergold and something stronger. “I’ve had a lot of practice. I don’t recommend it.”

“How do you know my name?” said Elida then, sitting down beside Aloy. “Did my father send you?”

Aloy rolled up her sleeve. The patch of frostbite was small and incomplete but it hurt like fuck. “Yes, he did.”

“Did he pay you?”

She wouldn’t lie. “Yes. But I’m not going to make you do what you don’t want to do, Elida. I just came to make sure you’re all right. I’m not here to force you home if that’s not what you want.”

Elida nodded. She seemed to trust Aloy. She glanced back to her camp. It was set up with a square garden of pretty herbs and a tent and a dead fire, some dead rabbits strung up and many more salves and potions for medicinal healing. The day was bright and new, the sun hot overhead. Aloy noticed that the camp had two bedrolls, and she looked around, but there didn't seem to be anyone else there on the island.

Meanwhile, Elida took off her elegant head-dress, and she drew up her knees and hung her head between them, and she sighed. She had red And puffy eyes. It looked like she’d been crying on and off for a very long time. “I’m alone,” she said.

“Are you?” said Aloy.

“At the moment, yes. I’ve been waiting for someone, but I don’t know where he is. I am okay, though. I promise.”

“Who are you waiting for?”

Elida became troubled. She looked away and her cheeks were very pink. She began drawing shapes in the red sand at her feet. An elephant, a butterfly. “Your name is Aloy, right?”

Aloy looked down at her hands as Elida changed the subject, the linen wraps around her knuckles and wrists, and she played along. “Yes. I’m Aloy.”

“I’ve heard all your stories,” said Elida. “How you saved King Avad from the Oseram invaders. How you can tame machines with your spear.” She looked up, curious and bright. “And yet now, you’re here for me? My father must be paying you a lot.”

“It’s not about money,” said Aloy, rubbing her hands together and pressing them into the sand. “Or, maybe it is a little. But in the end, I think you’re kind of my age, and I just—took an interest. Your father was worried you’d killed yourself, Elida. That’s serious.”

“He was?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you’ll get it then,” said Elida. She drew some more shapes: a tree, a sun, a hand. “Maybe I can tell you. Maybe you’ll understand.” It was almost like she was talking to herself. “You’re you.”

“Maybe I’ll understand what?”

“What I’m doing here,” she said. She sniffled. She started to cry. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t cry,” said Aloy. “Don’t apologize.” She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder, but she felt brute in her attempts at comfort as she always did. She did not feel like a comforting person, and this made her insecure. She did not know how to be soft, and she didn’t know what this meant for her. She was not a wise, soul-reading barkeep or a noble maiden wasting away on an island of moss. She had never learned those things. She was an outcast. “Please.” She lowered her voice anyway. She tried, because that’s what Aloy did. “It’s okay, whatever it is. It can be fixed.”

“Can it?” said Elida, a question.

“Well, maybe not,” said Aloy, giving in, feeling tired all of a sudden. “But I can’t know unless you tell me what’s wrong. Is this about another person? The person who shares your tent?”

“Do you know about that?” said Elida. “Have you ever been close to someone like that?”

Aloy thought hard about it. Despite the untold histories, the secrets, she knew now that she had. “Yes, a little.”

So Elida took a deep breath and told Aloy about Atral. She told Aloy that Atral had helped her plant the little garden by the camp, that they had used to be friends but now they were more than friends. She told Aloy that he had joined the Shadow Carja, and that this was their doom. She said that the war had changed him, that it had changed them both irrevocably, and that in answering that change, they fell in a kind of hard love, the only thing that could save their young souls. It was the only thing, like bells ringing in a far away land, and it drew them to its beauty but it was impossible, and it was ghosts. All ghosts. She needed help finding him and making sure he was okay, and she felt belittled by her weaknesses, and her father was too curious and too concerned to be of any help at all, and so she had to leave him or else go crazy. “He won’t get it,” she said. “All he’ll see is treason.”

She spoke of Atral’s sad eyes as the sun went up and up over the mesa. She spoke of how the war seemed to make him both taller but also brittle and sad. Aloy became so wrapped up in the story, she cast her eyes to the sky and then she closed them. She forced her mind into darkness for it was all she knew. Elida was a proper girl with good posture and enunciation, that is what she tried to think about. Elida did not deserve this, because she was an innocent. But then, Elida said something at the end of her melancholy prayer of love, and it was gritty and strange, and it jerked Aloy hard into the moment in which her idiotic deflection tactics fell away like an old curtain, and she saw only Nil inside her mind’s eye, and everything that became of him when the sun went down.

“It’s like…I’m dead,” said Elida, still drawing those shapes in the red sand. But they’d started to mix together, and Aloy couldn’t tell them apart anymore. “It’s like I’m dead, and I only come alive when I’m here with him.” She looked at Aloy, the utmost earnestness in her strange, royal eyes. “Do you know what that’s like, Aloy?”

Aloy became confused, because she did not. No matter what had happened to her, she had never once felt dead. She wondered if Nil felt dead sometimes, because that is who she thought of when the big questions came to mind. “No,” she said. “But I can understand what you’re feeling, Elida.”

Elida nodded, her eyes like little sad lights in empty windows. “You’re lucky then,” she said, wiping away all of the pictures she’d drawn in the sand, smoothing them free with her palm. “I feel so empty.”

“I’ll find Atral,” said Aloy, like a reflex. “Don’t worry.”

And she did. She did find Atral, but it wasn't what any of them wanted. Even still. _I’m_ _not dead,_ she said to herself that day and all night, like a chant, a reminder of self-forgiveness for all the things she wanted and wished for and how it measured up with what had come to pass. Losing Sickle, kissing Nil by the river. _I am me,_ she said as she lit an entire patrol of kestrels on fire, and as she watched, covered in blood, as Atral died on the dirty fucking floor of a cliffside watch on what had otherwise been a very clear and beautiful moonlit night. He was sturdy and good and he had kind eyes, and she didn’t understand what could make a young man like this get caught up inside a war like that. But how could she? Knowing what she knew now, or what she didn’t, rather. He gave Aloy a little metal key, all bloody, pressed it into her palm as if to symbolize the entirety of young love and life right there in a single gesture. Then, he asked if Elida was safe, and he asked for forgiveness. He promised that he had never betrayed her or their secret meeting spot. He said, “Give her this key, and please. Tell her…tell her it’s all worth it.”

Aloy left Brightmarket that very night, feeling mixed and torn, with Elida tucked into her grief and her loving father’s arms behind her _._ Elida had cried, but she was oddly filled with a new and tearful optimism that renewed Aloy. The woods were warm that night, and welcoming to her weary soul after she found Nil's note, accompanied by a cryptic map, and she sprinted cleanly through the forest, staying in the shadows, as quiet as can be, and when the moon was high and she knew that it was getting into the witching hour, and she had traveled many miles and made it very far,  she found a freshwater pool somewhere isolated off the river with the moonlight sprinkling through the trees and the fireflies off in the distance, and this is where she decided to build her simple camp for the night, and she took off all her clothes and folded them neatly beside the bedroll, and then she went into the water and washed Atral’s blood out of her hand creases and out of her hair. It felt good in the water, and she wasn’t afraid. She slept in her tent with the flap open and no fire, sound traps and tripwires planted everywhere, on all sides, but it was quiet that night in these parts of the Sundom, and nothing and nobody disturbed, almost as if someone had cleared a path for her.

Sometimes, when Aloy thought about Nil, she thought only about his demeanor upon killing a man. He stood tall and fierce as he ripped the spear from the meat of their spine, as if certain he could never die, and he let the body fall heavy to his feet in anger. But at the end of the day, there was nobody better at building and maintaining a camp than Nil. His delicate ways in how he applied the medicine, braided her hair. She wondered what it would have been like to hear his stories in childhood, all his different voices to pass the time. She thought about those days after Sickle, and how many nights she’d spent in the Borderlands, punishing herself—but for what? Punishment for something she couldn’t place. But she knew now. Survival is not a crime. This is what Aloy decided that night, young and feeling young. It is all worth it. She drifted, safe and sound in the far-flung weeds of existence with the big bugs buzzing in the treetops overhead. Her hair was down and unbraided as she slept, drying to frizz against the pillow that smelled of aloe and pine.


	7. Winter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: aftermath of violence, past suicidal thoughts_

He dreamed that her hair had planted into the snow chill and she had become the earth. She welcomed him with her small strangeness and the odd blindspots with which she experienced the world. Once, they were somewhere close, outside the Royal Maizelands, and there was a Carja wedding being performed with a young couple holding hands. There were few people in attendance—their parents and maybe an uncle or aunt, and the bride was pregnant beneath her pale blue dress. The dress moved in the wind like water, and Aloy watched, full of romance, and a little tear drew from her eye. These were the moments in which he knew that the killing was not in her nature. It was the saving that was, and the planting of new life, but she provided so little in the way of her own happiness. He had seen her adding beads to her armor like a decoration, and he knew that she desired stories and information and to express herself. But she didn’t know how. Many things and people that she once loved were dead now, and this made her reluctant to enjoy herself. He understood.

Her hands were dirty when she would braid her hair. The skin pink where it became her knuckles. She was not delicate except for that time she’d had to stitch him up after he’d got grazed by a bandit spear in the Sacred Lands. She was very good and swift with her needle and careful in her application of medicinal salves and things and you don’t think about that sort of thing as intimacy but she had sewn his skin back together and got his blood on her hands, and really if that isn’t intimacy, then what is?

She stood in the river now, up ahead. She was wearing linen trousers with the bottoms cuffed up and holding a big basket full of assorted fruits, and she had her hair unbraided, and it had grown long to her waist and was tied into a kind of ponytail.

 _Geez, Nil_ , she said, sweaty. _Are you coming or what?_

He went toward her and forgot how old he was supposed to be, or what he was supposed to be doing and which way was the sky. He was a ghost of something good. They went to a hut where there were pigs and a milk cow. He had not seen a milk cow in hundreds of years. The mountains were getting taller and closer to the sky. She patted the milk cow and he patted it, too, and he stood there with Aloy and her basket, patting a nice and quiet milk cow.

But at some point, Nil’s dreams always twisted back in and found many sharp thorns. There were red sands and an ocean of metal, and always ending up with Avad up on the top of the hill and Nil in the valley below, looking up at him as if it were the end of something. And the sounds were terrible. There could be blood for days and men with their limbs missing, but it was always the fucking sounds in the end.

 

Aloy had to grit her way through one patch of bandits on the way in. They had caught a glimpse of her from a tall mesa. She lit into them with a couple trip wires and heavy patience and the skirmish had left her with a burn on her right hand from a fire arrow. She thought of the two sides to her reality—frostbite on her left, burns on her right. She treated the burn easily with aloe vera that smelled like Nil while hiding out under an overhang of rock that was the color of blood.

It was deep evening, the moon high and cold, and Aloy didn’t know how late it was, or whether it was late at all. She kept thinking morning would come, but then it just kept getting further and further away. Time and the sky and all the wilderness seemed to expand at an unstoppable rate. She held a slight fear of being sighted again and stuck to the bramble of the woods where it was clear of men but not so clear of machines. Sometimes, she did not know which she hated more. She had to kill a stalker with her spear, and those things were like fucking animals the way they whirred down into death, like a long, purring mewl and it felt as if she were spearing a live creature. Crawling along the ground on her stomach she was dirty, but she cleared several sawtooths without drawing their eye, which was good, because she was tired, and sawtooths were big. When she finally found the path once more, she went into the river up to her knees where it was rich and cool and a respite from the sharper angles of her inevitable reality.

She knew when she was getting close. The machines tapered off again, and the world was quiet except for the giant bugs and the fruit bats, which she knew from the stored information in her focus, but she had never encountered them before in the wild. They would swoop down right past her face, and it was exciting, making strange squeaking noises, too fast for birds and too big for bugs. When it was still not morning, she finally smelled his fire, and she knew that it was his because he would sometimes burn cloves for the ambience, and this was a massive relief. This goddam fucking _wilderness._ That is what she kept thinking. In the forests out there, she set several motion-detection mines and a few tripwires, too, and she made a map of their whereabouts with some pigment ink on a strip of linen from her pack. She blew on the ink and once it was dry, folded up the linen square and placed it in her pocket. She was exhausted. She was so tired.

When she finally got to the camp, he was asleep. He didn’t usually leave the fire burning so big when he was sleeping, so he must have drifted off by accident, and this endeared her in ways she couldn’t really articulate, even to herself. Inside the tent was the glow from the fire and a little oil lamp for light. His body was long and stiff, his arms collapsed to his sides. She was quiet. It wasn’t good to wake Nil from dreams, as sometimes, they were nightmares. She went outside the tent to take off her chest plate and the chain mail and all these parts that weighed her down. She noticed the neatness of the camp and the purity of its location now that she finally had time to breathe. Nil loved clearings and ledges. His tent was wider and longer and heavier than hers. She lowered the volume on the fire, and she went back inside and closed the flap, and she took her braids down because he had noticed it last time and this seemed okay. He breathed in an uneven rhythm. He seemed distressed in his body and subconscious searchings. She wanted to soothe him and it caused her to cry because she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She knew it had only been two days but she felt it had been a thousand years since she’d touched him, and now she felt it, and it was all very big inside of her, like the weather outside. She laid down on the mat and faced him. She held his hand and waited. She continued to wish that it was morning.

In a little while, his breathing calmed as if he could sense that he was not alone. She didn’t understand just how important she was to him, or how far he had come since he’d met her. She didn’t know how close he had been, how many times he had almost drunk himself to death, or allowed his own throat to be cut by a bandit. Nil had always wanted to die. That was nothing new. But then there was the Carja wedding. And that night she had dragged his sorry drunken body in off the river bank, and he woke up inside of the tent at dawn. He looked around for her, and when she wasn’t there, he nearly panicked and went out looking, and he found her quickly, passed out cold with her hair blending into the weeds. The rest of the moonshine was gone, maybe drunk or maybe spilled into the river. He was crushed with guilt and also relief. He scooped her up. She was solid, but she still weighed very little. He set her down in the tent with her head on the pillow, and she did not stir, and he fell back asleep right there with her.

She had stayed, and she always stayed after that. She would keep coming around and make him feel like living. At some point, a man must come to a realization.

 

His eyes fell open, deep beneath his heavy brow. He was very still as he searched the ceiling of the tent, confused, awake, and then he looked at her. Right away, he smiled

“Aloy,” he said. He seemed alive there, and sturdy again.

She wiped her face with her palm. “Hi.”

“Are you crying?” he said.

She sniffled once and shook her head. “Not really,” she said. “Don’t worry. Are you okay, Nil?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He sat up, rumpled his hair. It was curly and dark. He didn’t press her on the crying thing. She wasn’t crying anymore. She was relieved now that he was awake. “How long ago did you get here?”

“Maybe an hour?”

“Did you run into any trouble?”

“Just some fucking bandits,” she said. She had a stick, and she was scraping it into the dirt beneath one corner of the bedroll. “Maybe nine or ten on a patrol.”

“Are you all right?”

She showed him the burn, wrapped up poorly in a linen rag. “It’s not that bad,” she said. “I just thought it would be morning by now.”

He held her hand in his, softly, and he studied her palm, the rough skin. Then he turned it over, unwrapping the linen bandage. The burn was raw, but it was like she said—not too bad. “Does this still hurt?”

“I used aloe.”

“It looks like it hurts. I have something stronger than aloe.”

She watched him. He was still groggy, she could see it, all the sleep in his eyes, but he wasn’t drunk tonight. He rubbed his hands down his cheeks to sort of liven himself and then he took a little jar from his pack. It reminded her of Elida. She wondered if all fancy Carja people were good with salves and things. Then again, Nil was not technically fancy. It was probably just a coincidence.

They were quiet together as he dabbed a clean piece of linen into the salve. It was a thick green and it smelled so medicinal, it dizzied Aloy but only for a minute. The burn was shaped like a triangle, and he covered it with a thick layer of the green stuff, and it was freezing cold at first, so as to sting, but she squeezed her eyes shut, and it was over fast. He wrapped her hand in a clean bandage. She studied his handiwork, very simple. Then she sighed, and she looked at him. “Nil,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I just—I learned some stuff. Over the past two days. I can’t keep it from you. It feels wrong.”

He studied her, innocent. “What kinds of things did you learn that you can’t keep from me?”

She rested her elbows on her knees. Outside, you could hear the fire crackling, whipping up into a fast frenzy. It had caught again of its own volition. “Thanks for fixing my hand.”

“It’s no problem, Aloy.”

“I learned things about you.”

He looked right at her, everything about him drawing up firm and stiff. “From Avad?”

She was surprised—that he jumped to conclusions so quickly. But she should have known. “Yes,” she said. She felt terrible now. She wanted to repent. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because—I was nosy. I shouldn’t have asked him. But I just—you have these dreams, Nil. You always seem to have terrible dreams.”

“You don’t know what I dream about, Aloy. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I don’t know what you dream about, because you don’t tell me. But I see you. I know—I just. I wish...”

“What do you wish?”

“You don’t owe me anything,” she said. She was shaking her head, looking at the hand he had bandaged so neatly. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I just needed you to know that I know, and then we can do whatever. We can move on.”

“What do you know, Aloy? You’re being incredibly coy here.”

She looked at him, and he was smiling—this she did not expect. Maybe Avad was right. Maybe she could have asked him all along.

“I know about your mother,” she half-whispered, like if she said it any louder, the trees might hear. “What happened to her. But I didn’t learn that from Avad. That, I learned from Brissa at the bar in the Maizelands.”

“Brissa?” said Nil. “The barmaid?”

“Yes. She knows you. She says she remembers you—from Meridian Village when you were kids.”

He looked around. He seemed to be having some sort of realization, but then it went away. He shook his head. “I don’t remember her.”

“It’s fine,” said Aloy. “She said you wouldn’t. She’s younger, or something? But it doesn’t matter. I didn’t ask her about you. She offered that to me, without even thinking. Please don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad. Why would I be mad?”

“Because I know.”

“Because you know my mother is dead?”

“Yes, and I know how she died.”

“And what does that mean to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No—I. It means everything, Nil.” She swore under her breath and got pissed off at herself. Why couldn’t she just be soft? “Fuck. I’ve been so nosy. I don’t know why I didn’t just ask you.”

“My mother was killed by Oseram bandits,” said Nil. He shrugged, brusque, but he was okay. “I was sixteen. Is that it? Because I don’t have bad dreams about her, Aloy.”

“I know that."

“Then what is wrong,” he said. He had begun to shred a twig in his fingers, turning it into little scraps. It was eucalyptus. Aloy could smell it inside. “I don’t care about the barmaid. What did Avad tell you.”

“He told me that the two of you were friends when you were young,” said Aloy.

“We were,” said Nil. “My mother was a seamstress. She made a lot of dresses for his mother. They were close. My father was in the Vanguard. Is that all?”

“No,” said Aloy. “He also said you were both in a bad skirmish together—during Jiran’s war. He mentioned that something happened. Something bad, with machines.”

A little light flickered inside him. In the distance, there were glinthawks. They always seemed to be fighting each other, and both Aloy and Nil turned to see. But then, they were quiet.

“He said we were there together?” said Nil.

Aloy had been staring at one of the seams in the tent for a long time now. She didn’t realize it, but her subconscious had been counting the little stitches in the leather. There were hundreds of them, all lined up in a row, sewn up in perfect harmony. “Yes,” she said. Then, she looked at him. His focus could be punishing at times, but he was just looking for the truth. “I mean—no. He didn’t say anything about you being together. He just mentioned that you were both there.”

“That is correct,” said Nil. His eyes were big, and he was like an outsider then. His hand had begun to shake—the right hand. This seemed to piss him off. He grabbed it with the other and clenched his eyes shut and shook out his head. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“Nevermind.”

“What happened at Cinnebar Sands?” she said. She just wanted to know. At first, it was just because she was curious, but now, she was worried, and she just wanted to know. Aloy was like a big blue kite up in the big blue sky and she was just going along, but she needed to be anchored to something, otherwise she was little more than a piece of trash in the wind. Nil was her anchor. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked Avad about the battle, Nil. I'm sorry. I’m a shitty person."

"You are not a shitty person," he said.

"He was just there," she went on, "and you’re my friend, and I heard you say it in your dreams once. The name of that place. I know you dream about it, Nil. You can tell me. You don’t have to, and you know that. But you also know that—whatever it is, whatever shit you saw there—if it’s machines, I’ll understand.”

“Do you think you can?” he said.

The glinthawks were at it again now. Aloy glanced back up to the ceiling of the tent on instinct, but they weren’t getting any closer. The trees were in their way outside, protecting, and this calmed her nerves. She looked at him. He was right there. So she just started talking. “I’ve seen bad things, too," she said.

"I know you have," said Nil.

"I've seen Corruptors ripping apart entire patrols of Nora Braves,” she continued. “Have you ever seen a Corruptor, Nil?"

“No."

“I remember ducking past one of them,” Aloy went on, looking at her hands. “They look like these huge spiders. Just huge, and I tripped into a puddle and I was so confused at first as to what exactly I’d fallen into. I thought it was mud. It was raining, so it took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t mud. It wasn’t rain. It was just blood. It was all blood. And the man I grew up with, Rost—you’ve heard me mention him. He wasn’t killed by machines, but he was killed by a man who I'm pretty sure serves one. The same motherfucker who cut my throat and gave me this scar at the Nora Proving after he and his merry band of murderers killed my friends. See?” She swallowed hard. She blinked hard. She picked up her chin and showed him. She knew he must have seen it before. It was hard to miss, but he reached anyway, and he touched her skin. She was going to lower her chin, but he held it in his hand, almost firm, and she let him, and she felt his touch and felt him looking.

“Helis killed your friends?” he said then, as he released her.

Aloy blinked. “You know him?”

Nil nodded once, as if it were obvious. He offered no more.

“They weren’t really my friends,” she said next, as if this were the important thing. She was sort of crying again and embarrassed. That she had no friends. “Anyway. I'm just saying, Nil,” she said. “I watched a boy die after he was speared by a Shadow Carja less than two days ago. He was younger than me, and he died, right in front of my eyes. I killed dozens of kestrels to try and save his life—with my own fucking weapons. I didn’t even know him.” She hung her head. “So I’ll understand, okay? You can tell me anything. I won't get scared, and I won't judge."

A little time passed. The wind had changed outside, and the smoke was coming in their direction now. It filled the tent with this feeling—like the seasons were changing. When she looked at him at some point, he was almost smiling to himself, but it was something else. He seemed to be reading her mind.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Thank you, Aloy."

"For what?"

"For telling me all that. I feel I know you better now.”

“And is that a good thing?” said Aloy, pushing the hair out of her face.

“Yes,” he said.

She exhaled. She breathed the smoky air. “So what about you?” she said. “Are you gonna tell me?”

He had his elbows resting on his knees. She could tell he was getting itchy, clamped down inside that tent. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

So they did. They went out to the fire, and they put on their jackets, half-armored. It was cool at night, even in these parts. Nil brightened up at the fire and seemed to be filled with its light and warmth and made new again. He watched it like it was just something to do—some way to pass the time. Aloy watched him watch the fire.

"This is better," said Nil.

“I feel like it’s been night for two years,” said Aloy out of nowhere. She had her chin resting in her hands. “When is the sun gonna come up?”

“You know, it’s about that time of year, Aloy.”

“What time of year?”

He tossed that stick into the fire, the one he’d been shredding inside the tent. “The time of year when night lasts for a long, long time.”

"Winter?"

"Yes, it just doesn't snow in these parts, not like in your Sacred Lands."

“Brissa said when you were a kid," said Aloy, "you used to write stories and tell them at the fire, and that you’d change your voice for all the characters.”

Nil laughed at this. “She really does remember me,” he said, placing his palms in the dirt. His hands were dirty and scarred. “I wish I remembered her.”

“It feels like you’ve been alive for so much longer than me,” said Aloy. “How old are you, Nil?”

“I’m twenty-five,” he said. “How old are you?”

She got oddly defensive. Not toward him, just in general. He offered all of this so easy now, now that they were just talking, and she felt stupid. “Nineteen.”

“You’ve had a lot more happen to you, Aloy. And you've done and seen a lot more. I promise. When I was nineteen, I was nothing like you. I’d kill anything. I didn’t have to have…reasons. I was a piece of utter shit in the years after my mother died, when the war first started.”

“That can’t be true,” said Aloy. “You can’t look back and judge yourself like that, Nil.”

He nodded, like he agreed, but she couldn’t tell if he actually did. “You think you’re young,” he said. “But the truth is, you are alive with wisdom. I’ve always known this, but inside, just now—what you told me in the tent. Now I’m sure. I was never that way. I made death into a sport because it was what I knew. But I don’t know that it was ever what I wanted.”

“Death, as a sport?” she said. “I’ve heard you say stuff like that. Not in a while, but I have. You still wear that stupid mask sometimes.”

He gave her a look. “A stupid mask?”

“Yeah,” she said. “All macho. Like you’re just ready to die.”

“I am,” he said, looking right at her, his eyes were a much sharper blue with the moonlight coming through the canopy holes. They ran in stark contrast to the rest of him. “Most of the time.”

“I get it,” she said. “But you don’t have to do that when you’re with me. You can just…be what you want, or what you are. Even if you don’t want to talk. You can trust me.”

“I know,” he said. He was looking right deep down into her soul. He smiled again. He kept doing that. He was full of this openness. She could picture him now, telling the stories, doing the voices. He was still young. It was just all hidden.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” he said. “Why do you think I’m here, Aloy? Why do you think I’m telling you this?”

_Yours is the warmest body I have known in some time._

She felt her mouth go dry, hot in her cheeks, like her stomach was dropping. She thought of all the things the world meant to her. All it had taken and left behind. “I’m not sure.”

He softened, then became serious again, and his brow sort of furrowed in as he studied her, and it was like he had something really important he needed to say. “Aloy,” he said.

She didn't know what to do. “Yeah?”

But then, they heard a big noise. It was fast, and loud, in the woods, like a bomb had gone off. They both looked off into the pit of darkness that was the clearing beyond, and they became fully alert.

“What the fuck was that?” said Nil.

"One of my traps," said Aloy. "I set traps."

"You set traps?”

“Yeah, I always set traps. I made a map. I made a map so that we could collect them in the morning.”

“I cleared this place out,” said Nil. “There are no hostile machines inside a mile radius. It took me half a day.”

“I know that,” she said. “And thank you, by the way. But those traps weren’t for machines. Those fucking bandits must have tracked me.”

Another one went off then, this one sounding like a trip wire. Aloy felt her breath catch. The night had gone wild, and the glinthawks were long gone. They heard a man letting loose in the woods outside the clearing then, with the wailing and screaming until there was a fast, guttural piercing sound, and then he was quiet. There was some flustered shouting and a lot of whispers in the foliage. The voices matched up with footsteps and they began to shift and spread out, and there was rustling in the trees and then a terrible silence.

Nil was on his feet in an instant. Aloy was crouched at his side, still as a stone, searching the trees for shadows, but it was all in shadow here, and they were not alone anymore in the clearing. She wanted to ask again why it still wasn't morning. But instead, she just said, "Fuck." It was all she could manage.

Nil bent slowly at the knees, picked up his spear from where it lie in the dirt. He straightened back up again and looked at her, wearing his mask. “Stay close,” he said.

Aloy reached for her bow.


	8. Dawn

This one time, when Aloy was young, maybe ten or eleven, Rost taught her how to fashion a mirror glass from the lens of a Watcher, and then he taught her how to fashion another, and then how to arrange herself between the two so that she could see the back of her head when braiding her hair. He did not typically use a mirror glass at all, but he told her it had been a method that his mother and sisters used when he was growing up. He told her all this while chopping carrots on a long cutting board in the yard, and preparing a soup made of root vegetables and boar.

Later that night, they were out at the fire like usual, taking inventory of the day and sipping cocoa—Rost spiked his with brown liquor—and Aloy asked him a question.

 _Rost, am I pretty?_ she said. She was holding the mirror glass in her hand. He we chewing on an acorn shell.

 _Aloy,_ he said, smiling. Overhead, the sky was clear and drawn up and inward to the big, white moon. The stars were so numerous, it lit the entire mesa and the valley below. _Why are you asking me this?_

_Because one of the jerks from Mother’s Crown called me a beet._

_A beet?_

_Yeah,_ said Aloy, gazing into her mirror glass. Her face felt scrunched. She set it down and put her chin in her hands. _He said I look like a beet, that I’m not pretty, but I don’t think I’m so bad._

Rost laughed at this. He spat the acorn shell to the earth. He set down his cup and picked up his dagger. _First off,_ he said to her, examining the blade, _That boy shouldn’t have been talking to you at all. He could be exiled for even looking in your direction. So you’ve got a one-up on him. He is bound by the rules of the tribe where you are not. For now._

Aloy smiled. 

 _And second,_ Rost continued. He took a small whetstone from his pocket. _Pretty doesn’t matter, Aloy._ He struck the whetstone to the metal, becoming serious again. _Pretty is meaningless, if you ask me. But there will always be men who will judge you on your appearance alone, and you’ll best them every time._

_Why’s that?_

_Because you are pretty,_ he said, his eyes crinkled as he pulled that whetstone down the length of the blade. _You are a beautiful girl. At least I think so, albeit, I’ll admit that I’m biased, as I love you like a daughter. Even still, that boy called you a beet, but you’re like the sun, Aloy, and you’re going to grow up one day, and you’ll still be beautiful, and because of this, that boy and nearly all men will think they can own you. Do you understand?_

 _They’ll think they can own me?_ said Aloy.

_Yes._

_Why would they think that?_

_Because there are men who believe the world was made to bow at their feet._

_But will they own me?_ she said. _Will they?_

He gazed at her, his eyes were hard. He stabbed the dagger into the earth and rested his elbows on his knees. He shook his head by the light of the fire. _Never._

He smiled out one corner of his mouth. So she smiled, too.

He directed her then to hand him the pot of cocoa. She obliged, and he poured some for both of them. _It is difficult for me,_ he said after a little while as he poured more liquor into his cocoa, _to have these conversations with you._

 _Why?_ said Aloy.

_Because I would prefer you never have to experience the ugliness of the world. Telling you this reminds me that, one day, no matter how I prepare you, you’ll have to go it alone._

She waited. He did not know how right he was. She watched as he took a long drink of his cocoa and looked up at the moon. She then drank her cocoa with the same mannerism, the same length of time. She looked up at the moon with the same angle of her neck as he did. She loved him desperately as a father.

She could only hope now that he knew.

 

“Nil?”

The traps had taken out most of the foot soldiers. Their screams were loud. Aloy and Nil had retreated through a tiny canyon that led out to the river. The moon was wide and low, but it was still full night, and five or six of them made it past the minefield and one caught Nil with his spear—a hard graze, right past one of his ribs, and it was a flesh wound, but Nil’s armors were a white stretched canvas in this part, and by the light of the stars, all she could see were dark stains, and she became impatient. Nil told her to move right in the shadows, and he went left, and they flanked them in the high trees, and Aloy dropped a canister of fire, which took out their path and two of them by surprise. She hit another two with arrows, and when she looked up, she couldn’t see Nil, and for a moment, this caused her to panic, but then she heard a sort of wet, muffled gulp, and when she looked down, she saw him in the high grasses beneath her, his spear buried deep in the final bandit’s spinal column. He dropped him hard, the body falling with the spear still in it.

It was done. Nil spat into the weeds and wiped the sweat from his brow. He looked mean in the natural light from the moon, but it was going to fade—the rise and fall of his chest would slow. She knew this. She watched him yank the spear from the dead bandit and wipe it clean with a handkerchief from his pocket. She waited until she was sure it was okay, and then she dropped to the tall grass from the tree tops, and she went to him. He dropped to a crouch and she by his side, and now he was looking out at the river. He didn’t stir as she touched him, peeling back the armor to see what damage had been done.

“It’s sort of deep,” said Aloy. "Are you okay?"

Nil seemed unconcerned. “Just leave it,” he said. 

“No,” she said. “These jungles are weird. It’ll fester. We gotta go back.”

He was still agitated. “Fine, but there will be more of them, Aloy. We should move our camp at first light.”

“What? No."

"No?"

"There are dead machines all over this clearing," she said. "I have plenty of wires, and fuel. We’re not leaving.”

Nil smiled at this. It was disarming. “You’re going to wire the whole woods, just so we can keep our camp?”

“Yes,” said Aloy.

This amused him, in a good way—she could see. “Very well,” he said. He looked back at the water, tossed the reed. “We can cut back through the canyon. There are going to be bodies.”

“They can wait, right? The heat stays gone with the sun, and at this rate, I’m not sure it’s ever going to come up anyway.”

“It’ll come,” said Nil. He had picked a reed and was now peeling it into very thin strips. "Do you have everything you need?"

“Yes,” said Aloy. “Back in the tent, I—”

She stopped cold, she was looking somewhere else, and her mind had gone there with it.

“What’s the matter?” said Nil. “Aloy?”

“Why is that there?” she said. She was on her feet now, looking around. Nil followed her gaze, about a fifty feet up the river, on the other side, and he could see what she saw now. The single blue light, the lone Strider, the one he’d left. “One Strider? There must be more of them, maybe on the other side of that bluff? I thought you said you cleared all the machines inside a mile radius?”

“I did,” said Nil, his body constricting. His ribs hurt. That spear had come right up against the bone, and every time he moved, he could feel it. “All the machines inside a mile radius.”

"Except this one."

"Right."

“You missed it?” she said.

“No, I did not. I left it on purpose.”

“You left it on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you leave it on purpose?”

He sort of grunted a little as he stood then, dusting off his pants. Aloy was staring at him. “I left it for you,” he said.

“For me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “After Sickle—I knew you wouldn’t get yourself another, so I left it. Obviously, I can’t override her programming. Only you can do that, Aloy, so the choice is yours.”

“The choice?”

“Yes,” said Nil. He limped toward her, holding his side. He lowered his voice. “It’s just a gift,” he said.

Aloy turned her head to look back at the Strider, and how its blue light flooded the water with the moon. It made big robotic noises, and it had no idea they were so nearby. It had no idea. It was just a machine. With the fighting over and the traps all let loose, smoking in the woods, the bugs in the trees seemed to wake up again. They rubbed their wings together and made buzzing noises, and there were fruit bats dive-bombing in the canopies. Aloy looked at Nil, perplexed, because it had been a long time since she’d received a gift. She tried to remember. “What if I don’t want it?”

“Take it or leave it,” said Nil. “I won’t hold it against you either way. I’ll kill it myself, if you want me to. Just say the word.”

“Don’t kill it,” she said.

“All right.”

“I want it—I just—” She turned back one more time, staring through the Strider, trying to make sure that it actually existed, that this wasn’t just a dream or some sort of hallucination. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and he nodded once, very solemn, like Nil. “You deserve it, Aloy. It was no trouble.”

There was a moment. Aloy felt very raw all of a sudden, like one of her layers had been peeled back. It was hard for her, and she held her feelings tightly within herself for no other reason than that was how she worked. That was what she knew. She tried to go back to that moment in time where she had felt free enough on the riverbanks near the Maizelands to stand on her tip toes and kiss him, but that was so far away by now. She’d lost her cool. And in trying to unfeel the moment, she realized that now, she was just busy worrying about his wound, how he was bleeding, and how it was getting worse. The blood was everywhere. The blood was dark. “We need to get you back,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“I’m fine,” said Nil.

“Nil.”

“I swear that I’ll survive for another four minutes while you go collect your gift.”

She sighed. She was reluctant, but she felt like she might cry from gratitude, and so she looked away. “Don’t move,” she said. “Moving makes it worse.”

“I have to move, Aloy.”

“I know,” she said. “Just don’t move…suddenly.”

He thought this was funny. He showed her his palms in surrender. “No sudden movements,” he said. “I swear. Now go.”

 

Once they were back at camp, Aloy left the Strider to graze in the orange halo from the fire. Nil surveyed the machine carefully, like he was testing it, and then he let his approval show by patting it gently on the flank. He had never done that with Sickle. He didn’t seem to register the machine as anything real—just cargo, a means to an end. “Is this a he or a she?” he said.

Aloy was rifling through her bag. She found her needle and her sutures. “What do you mean?”

“The Strider,” he said. “What does it feel like to you?”

Aloy walked over to him in the firelight. She placed her hand on the Strider’s flank, next to his. “A she.”

“What will you name her?"

“Maybe...Dawn? Wishful thinking, I guess." She smiled down at her boots. "Come on."

Nil followed her back to the tent where she tied off the flap and they sat on a mat, outside, near the doorway. They sat facing opposite ends of the clearing while Aloy lit a lantern and helped Nil with the ties and hooks so he could remove his chest plate and the canvas and linens and the bit of chain mail that had failed him, pressed to his side.

The thin undershirt was stained very dark.

She didn’t want him to lift his arms, so she slit the fabric with her hunting knife, and then she pulled the shirt apart at the seam to reveal the wound underneath. The graze was deep and still bleeding a little, but mostly it had stopped off by now. This was a relief.

He sat with his elbows resting on his knees. He hung his head between them. “Shall I live?” he said.

“Shut up, Nil.”

He smiled.

She told him to brace himself. She took a half empty bottle of moonshine and drizzled what was left over the graze. He was stoic, but his breath hitched and his eyes squeezed shut. She blotted and cleaned away the blood on his skin, then she held her needle to the flame of the lantern for many seconds, steadied her hands and got to work. They were quiet for a long time.

“You should stop getting grazed,” she said to him after a while. Aside from their breathing, they could only hear the bugs in the trees and the distant Glinthawks, the crackling of the fire. “This is becoming a habit.”

“There are worse wounds.”

"I know.”

“At Cinnebar Sands,” he said, “I was swiped by the tail of a Thunderjaw. I hit my head so hard, I lost my vision for a second. That was worse.”

Aloy paused. She worked slowly, but she was nearly finished. “A Thunderjaw?”

He nodded once.

“I’ve only seen one,” she said. “Once. In the Gatelands. I’ve never fought one.”

“They're not easy,” he said. "Maybe from a distance, and with hours at your disposal. But in a cage match, you're likely to meet your doom."

Somehow she knew this would be fruitless. “Did you take it down?” she said. “I learned that—Rost, he taught me that ropes are useful for big machines like that.”

“Indeed,” said Nil, “and yes, I brought it down, but I had help.”

“What else happened?” she said, bringing the needle back again, but maybe she tugged too tight. He winced. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s fine, Aloy.”

"Shit." She felt bad. She got quiet. She finished closing him up, and he had his eyes closed. She tied and trimmed the sutures. She placed a piece of gauze over the wound and used an adhesive salve to cover it in a long strip of linen. It was done. They both sighed with relief and looked at the fire, and then Nil shifted around so that he could see her. She got up from the ground and dusted off her pants.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Back to the river,” she said, showing him her hands, stained in his blood. “To wash these.”

He shook his head. “There’s water in the canteens.”

“I need to lay the traps anyway.”

“We have time,” he said. “Wait until dawn. Stay, Aloy.”

She thought on it. She nodded and sat back down, and he handed her a leather canteen, and she poured a spare amount on her palms, rubbing them together, and then she wiped them off on her pants and studied her nails. There was still some blood. “Does it feel okay?” she said.

“It feels fine,” he said. “What about you?”

She took a very deep breath. She showed him her hand, the burn she’d gotten the day before. The bandage was peeling off. She let him clean and fix it for her. At some point, there was nothing left to do but acknowledge that they had just been through a great deal. They held hands.

“Nil,” said Aloy after a little while. The nightingales had started singing in the trees.

“Yes?” said Nil.

“I know what we talked about before, with Avad. I think that he—I think he has feelings for me,” she said. She scratched an itch on her nose. “I think he followed me out to your camp the other day. Sorry for the non-sequitur.”

“He did follow you,” said Nil. “He came out to talk to me.”

“What did you guys talk about?” she said.

“Ersa,” said Nil, tracing the lines on her palm, very casual. “And you. You’re right in that he does…like you. So to speak. But a man in mourning is not to be trusted with matters of the heart.”

“I don’t get it,” said Aloy. “He’s like a king.”

“He’s not like a king,” said Nil, and he gave her back her hand. “He is the king. Aren't you flattered?"

She rolled her eyes, studied her her knuckles.

But Nil was grinning. “You know,” he said, “an alliance between the great Nora and Carja tribes would be politically expedient at this point in the game, Aloy.”

“What?”

“An alliance forged by a strategic marriage—that would be unshakable. It could be you. You could be his queen. You could live your life in perpetual safety, live a life of dreams come true. You could fight in his Vanguard if you choose. Of course he’d never let you see battle. But he would not prevent you from your calling, if that was what it took to keep you.” He took a swig from the canteen, held it out to her. “Don’t you agree?”

“What?” she said, yanking the canteen. “Marry Avad? Are you fucking kidding me?”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Then you marry Avad.”

Nil laughed at this. “He and I could never get along well enough for marriage. Not anymore.”

“I don’t want Avad.”

“It’s not always about _want_. Sometimes, it’s about what’s best.”

“But I’m not—that. I’m not that, Nil. I’m not a queen. You know this.”

“Perhaps.”

“Avad has to know this by now.

He shrugged. “Men tend to see what they want to see.”

She took a drink from the canteen. She set it down. “What do you see?” She said. “When you look at me, what do you see?”

He seemed content. He had been teasing her, but not anymore. He tucked the hair behind her ear, his jaw firm. “Just you,” he said. “I only see you."

His hand lingered, grazing the little freckles of her cheek. She was blushing from the conversation and now his touch. It seemed to bring them both home. The violence was past. She could feel the dirt in her pores, the blood stuck on her skin, but it didn't seem to matter. She was tired but alive there, with him at the end of the night. She could hear Dawn, shifting around by the fire, her great big robotic movements, alive. Aloy felt many pieces of her hardened exterior falling away then. She couldn’t help it anymore. He was right there, looking right at her with his weird blue eyes that seemed to cut through anything. There was nothing that could outlast them. And before she knew it, their faces where very close. She could smell the aloe in his hair and on his skin again. She could feel his breath. She understood very little nuance in the way of attraction, but she just knew that she wanted him.

"Nil," she said.

“It’s no use,” he said to her, a surprise.

She blinked. “What’s no use?”

“Talking, the fight.” His resolve filled the air, making the world feel clean. “We're right back where we started. There's only one thing to say.”

“What?" she said.

“I missed you. Aloy.”

"When?"

“When you were gone."

The sky was turning purple. Nearby in the hissing melodies of the protected forests, the daytime animals rose with the sun, and she was safe.

No more interruptions. Their mouths touched, soft, eyes closed. They kissed.


	9. Heavy

They slept beside one another. It was only a few hours before the sun got hot and high. When she woke up, he was no longer pressed around her, like when they had fallen asleep. The tent was too warm. But he was close, on his back with one hand resting on his chest. He breathed even, heavy and deep. The black hair curled back off his face and around his ear. He hadn’t woken once that morning, no shaking or mumbling. His mind seemed all quiet. She was still in her clothes from the night before. After the kiss, they just went into the tent to go to sleep. As she drifted, he lie behind her and told her about Carja parades in winter, and how they would be happening very soon, maybe even right now. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck. He seemed to be separating the pieces of her hair—or something—with his fingers. She couldn’t tell exactly. Some of this was new, but Nil touching her hair wasn’t new. He had braided it before.

 _What do they celebrate?_  she said, her head resting on the inside of his arm.  _The Carja parades._

 _It’s more an invocation,_  said Nil. She could sense that his eyes were closed, even just as he spoke.  _A prayer to the sun, mostly in the night._

 _Is that all the Carja do?_  she said, kidding.  _Pray to the sun?_

_I once heard the Nora spend all their time praying to a mountain. Are we so different?_

Aloy appreciated this. Though she had never once personally prayed to a mountain.

When Nil woke up, they went about their morning routine in a kind of normalcy. It was time to go. Aloy had never gone back to the woods to refresh her traps. It was time to get out of this unlucky bandit country. They would come back for the rest of them when they had more time. Nil took down the tent while Aloy buried the fire. They decided to leave the bodies, like a warning. She went over to Dawn, who had grown still in the morning. Sickle had used to do a similar thing. It was like some form of recharging. They’d make a whirring noise and the light in their face would grow dim, and they’d be very still. When Aloy approached, Dawn stirred, and her light came back to its full capacity. She seemed to wake up. Aloy patted her on the flank and gave her an apple that she had saved from breakfast. Nil worked quickly, and the air was muggy, so he had taken off his shirt. The sunlight came through the canopy in heavy, oppressive bars. For winter, it sure was hot in this part of the Sundom. She watched him drinking water from a canteen, and then he handed it to her and went back to work packing in the tent. He strapped it all firmly to Dawn on the loin, and then he patted her again like he had the night before and stood beside her, eating a green pear. He had tied his hair into tight knot at the top of his neck. He was taking a break.

Aloy was fully dressed for the road by now. She had begun to feel anxious about their kiss, but Nil didn’t seem anxious. He must have sensed her staring at him at some point, because he smirked at her, still chewing his pear.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, still smirking. He wiped some of the juice from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” said Aloy.

“Why are you looking at me like  _that_?” said Nil.

“Because,” she said. She got red and frustrated, but it was stupid. It made her laugh. “I have no idea.”

They took turns riding Dawn back to the Maizelands. It was still mostly quiet in the terrain, but it had only taken a single night for new machine herds to move into the area. There were Glinthawks, too, in the wake of Nil’s initial hunt, and this seemed to agitate Dawn, who was a little more sensitive to her surroundings than Sickle had ever been. The revelation was strange for Aloy. She hadn’t realized machines could develop personalities, but Dawn had been living in a much more stressful terrain than Sickle, and maybe that had something to do with it. They hid in the outcroppings of a huge mesa somewhere along the road and picked off the Glinthawks one by one. Their absence made Dawn much calmer, and they got moving again.

“It’s okay,” Aloy said to Dawn, whispering into her mechanical ear. “Nobody likes Glinthawks. It’s okay.”

With the path cleared, they were able to make it back to the civilized parts of the Sundom by nightfall. Nil wanted to camp by the river, but Aloy was tired of the outdoors. She was used to certain creature comforts, even as an outcast, and even as she did not always feel that she deserved them. She let herself fall prey to her desires for cottages and warm food every once in a while, and tonight, that was what she wanted. So she convinced him that they should spend one night inside the Maizelands. They needed a break from the wild, and though he seemed to agree with her sentiment, he was tense. He did not like treading this close to Avad, and he did not like taking up civilized quarters in his kingdom. The tension between them was palpable and filled with anger, and she could see it in his face, the way he tightened his jaw as he nodded in consent, and she wished she could know more—about them, about what had happened to make them this way, but now was not the time.

“It’s not Meridian,” said Aloy as they approached the gate. “And you’ve come into the Maizelands before, to go to the tavern, haven’t you? It won’t be so bad, Nil. I promise, and if it is I'll take all the blame.”

“There's nothing to blame anyone for,” he said. He seemed to unclench as the time went by. It was passing. “You’re right. It's okay.”

They tied up Dawn in one of the little farms outside the city walls. There were chickens and boar and some donkeys in a makeshift stable. Some people gave her a strange look as she did it, but they all seemed to know Aloy in these parts by now, and that she could override machines for her own purposes, and they weren’t brave enough to confront her over their anxieties about having a machine on the premises. She paid the man at the makeshift stable for a one-night’s stay.

“She eats apples and grass,” she said. “She's just like anything else. Okay?”

The man wore a bowler hat and had a craggy face. He was chewing on his corncob pipe. He nodded in a trustworthy manner and said, “I got it.”

After leaving Dawn, Aloy wanted to wash her hair in the river before going inside. She thought she must smell like shit.

“You smell good,” said Nil, shrugging.

Aloy didn’t believe him.

She rolled her pants up past the knee and waded into the water. She dipped her head in, and Nil sat down on the riverbank to wait. He ran some water through his own hair and seemed relieved by this. He was growing calmer. The sun was down, and it was twilight and cooling off considerably. Nil had removed his armor back at the farm and was just back to his trousers and boots and a linen shirt put together with very fine, colorful stitching. The Carja always had beautiful clothes. She wondered if he had learned the technique from his mother, who was dead, or if it was something he had taught himself. Either way, she knew him well enough to know that he had not purchased the garment from a Carjan artisan. He would have made it with his own hands.

“Do you think Dawn will be okay?” said Aloy. She was standing in the river, shaking her hair out. Nil had prepared a plain cotton towel for her. He handed it over, and she wrapped it around her head.

“Yes,” said Nil. “Stablemen are different than civilians. They like animals better than people.”

“Dawn isn’t an animal,” said Aloy. “She’s a machine.”

“Yeah, but she acts like an animal. It’s all the same once you get past the metal. Either way, nobody is going to mess with you, Aloy. You can count on that.” He smiled. Then, he studied her.

She became very suddenly self-conscious. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“That’s a good look for you,” he said, pointing to the towel on her head.

“What?”

She saw him smirking again and shoved him once in the shoulder. But she was flattered.

“Shut up, Nil.”

He laughed.

Inside the Royal Maizelands, it was just like Nil had said. They were getting ready for a night parades. There were people standing around, waiting, and a path had been cleared through the main part of the settlement. There were women dressed in elaborate costumes, and children with their faces painted like the sun and stars. Even in twilight, they loved their god. And it was fortuitous for Aloy. Nobody noticed her, like they so often did. Nobody stopped her or tried to sell her things or to ask her if she had seen their bumbling husband or idiotic hunting partner while out on her various travels. She was so sick of people knowing who she was. It just got annoying. But that night, nobody cared who she was. They were preparing for their Carjan festivities. It seemed that some outlanders had come to join the celebration. A band with a lute, a harp, and several wind instruments played on a low platform nearby. The melodies were sweet and upbeat. The merchants had filled little jars with lit wicks in candle wax and hung them from clotheslines, strung up in the trees and all across the paths and walkways and entrances to the marketplace. As they walked through the display, Aloy looked up at Nil to try and measure the proper reaction. He seemed content and like he both noticed but also did not care about the differences in the atmosphere. Sometimes, he belonged to her, and sometimes, he was a total stranger. She wanted to know his whole life and everything in it.

When they got to the tavern where Brissa worked, it was full but not bursting. Aloy feared all the rooms would be already rented upstairs. But Nil told her that it was mostly locals in the Maizelands that night. “There will be some outlanders,” said Nil, “but not all of them.”

Aloy hoped that this was true. There was a small group of Oseram travelers in the bar, drinking out of huge flagons, but they weren’t causing any trouble. Aloy tried to remember the last time she had seen another Nora face. It had been so long ago. She tried not to miss that place. It had done her no favors in her short, stupid life.

They went up to the counter where Brissa leaned, shining up a bar glass. She smiled to see them both. She mostly confirmed Nil’s prediction and said that she had one room to rent. She said she had been holding it for a friend from the big city but that her friend had not been able to make it. “It’s all yours,” said Brissa. “Free of charge.”

“What?” said Aloy. “Noway. I’m paying.”

“Please,” said Brissa, waving her off. “I neither want nor need your money.”

“Accept it,” said Nil to Aloy. “It is a great honor to be offered a gift like this by a Carja merchant.”

“Are you bullshitting me?” said Aloy.

“Yes,” said Nil. “But why does it matter?”

Brissa was laughing. She wore a pretty headdress that night. She had a piercing in her nose in the shape of an elephant. “You should listen to Brother Nil,” she said. “He is a wise soul.”

“That, I am,” said Nil. He sat down at the bar with a sarcastic sort of confidence. Aloy gave into their joint theatrical nature. “Give us wine, barkeep,” he said.

“Right away,” said Brissa. She gave Aloy a long, knowing look after that, and then she went away for the bottle. Aloy felt perpetually confused by these sorts of looks. She thought she must have missed out on something in her youth. Of course, she had missed out on a lot of things, one of those things being a mother. But she tried to remember Rost, if anything at all. She had seem him conversing with women at the outcast markets. The outcast markets were these little shit markets for outcast artisans and farmers to come and sell to one another. Rost made beautiful weaponry. He made many trades at the markets for food and supplies, and he did so in a quiet confidence. He did not speak much, but when he did, he seemed to know what to say, and people liked him. Women liked him. He never showed them any real sort of interest beyond gratitude, but he was attentive. Aloy knew that Rost had once been married, but that his wife had died, and that was enough or him. He would not marry again. At the markets, she watched him closely anyway. He always told Aloy she had a kind of natural wit that endeared her to all the people at the market, and it would carry her a long way in life. Aloy still didn’t know what this was. She often felt unsure of herself in social situations. But she liked people. She liked their sounds and their warmth and their company. They made her feel strong.

Brissa served their wine in pretty glasses with twisty stems. It was a warm, sweet yellow wine made of grapes grown in a nearby vineyard. Aloy liked it very much. It reminded her of the winters she’d used to know. Nil was amused by its sweet taste and though he finished the glass, he asked for something a little stronger to help wash it down. She poured him a little brown liquor, and then she served them dinner on heavy porcelain plates. White fish with grains and a light salad with citrus fruits. Aloy enjoyed the food and the whole room and her conversation with Nil. He spoke easy and told stories like he always did, so good at talking it could make you forget all about the world outside. Brissa was a calming influence on them both. She talked about her wedding on the Daybrink not two years before. “I wore a dress that went all the way down past my feet, and it had a train that was ten feet long,” she said. Aloy didn’t understand the extravagance, but she was enchanted by the idea and desperately longed to see the dress. Brissa told her that next time Aloy was in the Maizelands, she would take her back to where she lived near the docks with her husband, and show it to her. She said Aloy could even try it on if she wanted, but Aloy demurred.

After they were finished, Nil got up from the bar, very tired seeming. It had been a long day, and he was ready to go upstairs. Aloy didn’t want to go quite yet, and this made him smile. It was in his nature to leave her be, and he said he would try to wait up, but she told him it was okay. They said goodnight, and Brissa went down the bar a little bit to help a young woman uncork her bottle of wine. There was a moment. Nil seemed to bite down and swallow his pride, or at least that was what it looked like to Aloy. He set his hand on her shoulder in a reassuring way. It was firm but gentle, like everything with Nil, and then he bent slowly and kissed her on the temple, soft, and he stayed there for a moment, and she thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He smiled, and he released her, and then he went upstairs.

She felt very high up and far away and right inside the sun’s warmth, sipping her golden wine alone at the bar. But Aloy’s instinct was always to make these things into some flight of fancy, as this was safer, so she cleared her throat as if to speak, and then she had to make her heart quit pounding and shut the fuck up, so she took a long drink, polishing off the glass.

“You seem to know him,” said Brissa, coming back now. She had a towel over her shoulder, and she leaned on her elbows, close so that they could speak privately.

“I do,” said Aloy. “Better now than I did before, last time we talked.”

“He is careful with you,” said Brissa, sort of lost in the moment. “He considers your needs. And you got him to spend the night inside the village? That is a triumph. You are good together.”

“Yeah,” said Aloy. “I guess.”

“What’s the matter?” said Brissa, sensing something had gone off just then, like a tilt in the earth’s access. Somewhere nearby, there was uproarious laughter. The lute continued to play its upbeat serenade to the moon, which held the sun's place in the night.

“We’ve only kissed,” said Aloy. The moment she said it, she knew that it was a big part of what had been on her mind. She was paralyzed in some ways. She didn’t know what came next. She gazed down into her empty glass. “I don’t really think we’re…together? Or, we haven’t—I mean, we  _haven’t_.”

"You haven't what?”

“You know,” said Aloy.

“Oh,” said Brissa, surprised. She smiled and took the towel off her shoulder and set it down in a pile on the counter. “So what?”

Aloy gave her a look. “So what?”

“Everything comes at its own pace. That part of your relationship will express itself when the time is right.”

“But when is it?” said Aloy. She suddenly seemed to need Brissa’s advice very badly. She felt so fucking stupid sometimes, shifting around in her seat like a little kid. “I mean. When is it right? You seem to know about this stuff. Is it right now?”

“It is right when you know it is right.”

“But that’s confusing,” said Aloy, putting her head in her hands. She pushed the hair off her face and blinked hard. She felt suddenly like she might cry. “How am I supposed to know? I’ve never done it. I mean—I know the basic procedure. But I’ve never thought about this before. Not with anyone. I’ve never had to.”

“Aloy,” said Brissa. She placed her hand on Aloy’s hand. Then she picked up the bottle from under the counter and poured her another glass—this one was smaller than the last. She put the bottle away and continued, smiling very sisterly. “You worry too much.”

“Why doesn’t he just…I don’t know? Make a move?”

This made Brissa laugh. “He is hesitant, because he doesn’t think he deserves you, and he’s still trying to figure out why you haven’t left yet.”

“I leave all the time.”

“You know what I mean, Aloy. Maybe you leave, but you have your reasons. What’s important, is that you keep coming back.”

“But what does that mean?”

“You just have to use your instincts,” she said.

Aloy laughed this off. She took a drink of her wine. “Yeah, my instincts,” she said. “If only I were as confident with Nil as I am with killing machines.”

“You are a woman of your heart,” said Brissa, out of nowhere. She took her hand off of Aloy’s hand, and she placed it over Aloy’s heart. “I sense this about you. You have romance living inside you. The romance of the earth and the skies, of metal. The way you keep and name your machine companions, and how you decorate the braids in your hair with thread and beads. Men are much simpler than these things. They may seem smart and strong on the outside, but they are brute creatures within, and sometimes that is all they are used to and so all they have come to expect. But you offer more. I see it, and he offers you something, too. He makes life seem…safe. He is a fixture, a constant. The world is funny and carefree with Nil. It’s just all full of stories. Like the good times don’t have to end, and they don't. You’ll know when you know. The time will come, if it is meant to be, and when it does, you will not hesitate to make your move, Aloy. Trust me. I’m always right about stuff like this.” She smiled and took back her hand. She was leaning far over the bar and had her arms folded beneath her.

Aloy looked down at a moth that had dropped into her wine. It had got caught and flapped around in a panic. She sighed and helped it out with her pinky finger, and then she set it free into the tavern atmosphere. It was fine. It flew away. She looked at Brissa who had become dreamy. “Thank you,” she said, her heart full with gratitude and feeling calm now. “I don’t have a lot of people to talk to about this. You’re a big help.”

Brissa smiled. “It’s what I’m here for,” she said. And then a man called her name from down the bar, and she went to pour him another glass of brandy.

 

Aloy went upstairs a little while later. She thought she’d find Nil asleep, but he was very much awake, lying on his back with his head propped up on a few pillows, reading a heavy book. He was happy to see her, but they went about their nightly routines. There were two beds with pretty blue silk covers. It was a nice room with a window, and Nil had opened the window so that a cool breeze blew in. The room was lit with many candles, and it had bookshelves full of books with titles Aloy had never heard of before. She sat down on the bed opposite of Nil’s and began to undo her braids. She was sleepy and a little tipsy, but she felt relieved by her conversation with Brissa and glad that she had stayed at the bar a little longer. She liked nights like this—the ones that went on just a little too long. She liked to enjoy the evening and be around people like the sort that lived in the Maizelands. Even though they were still Carja men and women, they were simpler than the nobles of Meridian. It did not annoy her the way life annoyed her in the Palace of the Sun. Nobody fussed over her, and she didn’t have to be under guard or followed around by servants and spies and handmaidens.

But then, a change. Just as she was about to remove her focus for the night, she heard a flicker come from the inside. It buzzed in her ear and then static, clicking into place. The curtains rustled at the window. Outside, you could hear all the people still, way out there on the promenade like ghosts.

_Aloy._

It was Sylens. She sat up straight real fast and she took out her focus, and she set it down on the bedspread like a little, poisonous jewel, and she stared at it. She really stared. It was so small. She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed, as it was not time to cry. “Fuck,” she said. She felt tiny and insignificant, like a dumb pebble. She picked up her knees and hugged them to her chest and closed her eyes.

It was a couple minutes. When she opened her eyes again, she saw Nil sitting there, with his feet on the floor, watching her. He had closed his book and set it neatly on the nightstand. His hair was knotted off his face, and he was concerned. “What was that about?” he said.

She took a big breath and shook her head, making a big show of trying to smile. She took off her boots one by one and sat across from him, hugging her arms to her chest. She studied the frostbite near her elbow and how it was almost healed. She felt her hands against her own body, and how clean they were, and she stopped smiling. “It was nothing.”

“Aloy.”

“I have to go,” she said, nodding to herself. “That’s all that was. A reminder that I have to go.”

“Now?” he said.

“No,” said Aloy, looking at him, trying to be soft. She didn’t mean that. She shook her head and said it again. “No, of course not.” He was waiting, listening, staring deep into her with his familiar focus. "Not tonight."

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“If I wait any longer, Nil, things are going to get...worse."

He nodded, understanding and secure. She did not need to explain herself to him. The breeze blew in again. This time, it rattled the shutters a little bit. Nil paid it no interest. He became much more serious after this. They had never really talked about what she was going through, but she knew he had gleaned a great deal on his own. He knew that she was dealing with the Shadow Carja and Helis, and she had mentioned the mystery surrounding the woman she thought might be her mother, and Sylens, though only in passing, and this was enough to sober him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to be sorry Aloy. Just answer one question.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

Outside, there were the sounds of fireworks. They were far away in the distance, but you could hear the people  _ooh-_ ing and  _ah-_ ing. The question had surprised Aloy. It shouldn’t have. He always asked this. Every time she left him in those recent months, every time they parted in the wild, he always asked if she needed his help, and he was always earnest in his intent. But this time, it was different. They weren’t in the wild. They were in a safe, clean place with soft lighting, and outside, you could hear the music and the laughter and the parades and fireworks, representing their happiness in the world. The invocation of the sun.

She did not need his help. She knew this, but whether she needed his help was not his question. Did she want him to come with her? That was the question. But Aloy didn’t see this. She couldn’t see past what she already knew. She just saw him, and how he was always worried, but for some reason, it just now seemed to feel true. That he did care for her, and she cared for him—enough to ask Brissa the questions she’d asked her tonight. Aloy was guarded in these moments. It wasn’t selfishness. It was self-preservation. She did not realize how much the bad things in her life had come to affect her. When she had watched Atral die, she had a moment of clarity that drove her back to Nil out of some reckless abandon. It was their routine. But now, in the Maizelands, that abandon was clouded with more uncertainty, mixed up with her feelings for Nil, which were so real, they had transcended her ability to articulate them in any way that made sense. Brissa had made her feel better for a moment, like the future was simple and like it would come right to her if she just let it, but that was back in the tavern, and back in the tavern, Aloy’s life,  _was_  simple, just like Brissa's, and up here, it was simple, too, but out there, it wasn’t simple. She stared at him.

If he came with, something bad could happen, she thought. If something happened to him, she would have no one to return to. Nothing to look forward to. What would become of her?

Outside the curtained window, outside the walls of their tent when they were in it, that is where her troubles lived. Alone. She had decided this long ago. He couldn’t go there with her. He had to stay, where the air was clean and clear and the nights were gold.

“No,” she said, trying to smile again. “I’ll be okay.”

He studied her, like he was reading her mind. Maybe he was. He seemed to have that ability, and she had lost her will to second guess. His brow furrowed, waiting, but when she said no more, he knew the matter was settled, so he nodded once, jaw firm, and he conceded. “All right,” he said. “Will you at least tell me where you’re going?”

“Yes,” said Aloy. This, she could do. She could make a plan. Plans were good. They made sense. She told him where she was going. She made him a map, on paper. This small reassurance comforted Nil, though he did not say much else after that.

They put out the candles, all except for one in a brass holder by the door. They were in their separate beds. The time was not right. Aloy stayed awake for a while, staring past him as he slept. She stared out the curtained window, thinking about her life and how certain she was that she had to face it on her own. She had wanted to go to Brissa’s house by the harbor and look at her wedding dress, but this seemed foolish in hindsight, a stupid dream.

She finally fell asleep when her brain went numb and she couldn’t take it anymore. It was a couple of hours before dawn. Meanwhile, downstairs, Brissa stayed up all night in the tavern, serving the revelers brandy and cigars and her own charming wisdom from the bottom of her heart. Back at the stables, Dawn had gone into her whirring rest mode, just like always, and the craggy-faced stableman had come out of his little house in the middle of the night just to study her. But like Nil had said back at the river, he was only curious. He did not wish to disturb. He was a man of nature. The parties in the village did not quiet completely until morning, but Aloy would sleep through this, when finally the sunrise culminated all of their prayers and brought its relief to the Maizelands. It touched everywhere and everything in all the land, making it new. Even in her restlessness, the sun spoke to her through her dreams. It spoke to him, too, and it kept him calm. Nil saw her again just like before, standing in the river, holding that basket full of fruit, laughing like it was so easy. He knew that’s not what it was. Easy. This dream was some kind of stupid teenager reverie, but the old mind plays tricks. He knew that, too, and he let it play on, because he knew the difference. His mind held onto her like something good to keep the darkness behind the horizon in his dreams. The truth is, he already loved her.


	10. Apple

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: implied domestic violence_

He went along the river, collecting Hintergold. It was evening, but not quite dark yet. Occasionally, Nil sold his salves for cash, and this made life easier. Usually, he sold only to outlanders and traveling merchants looking to buy in bulk, but he had promised himself that he would stay in the Maizelands for at least three nights, so that she could find him easily if she needed to. Whatever money he pulled, he would give to Brissa after that. He knew she wouldn’t want his money, but he had to insist. It was one thing when he was with Aloy, but Nil was the sort of man who liked to earn his keep.

The banks were shallow and sludgy. It had been a long time since their last rainstorm. The air was parched and anxious, and at one point, he went out and sold a few jars to the stableman outside the city, the same one who had looked after Dawn and kept her fed the night before.

“How well do you know the Nora girl,” he said to Nil eventually. They had already traded hands and now they just stood on his front porch, talking, where the man kept many shelves and strange concoctions in colorful jars and vials. There were a couple hens pecking around the wood at their feet. Somewhere nearby, a cow groaned ecstatically. Nil remembered this sound from his rural childhood and wondered for a moment if she might be giving birth.

“Well,” said Nil. “Is your cow okay?”

The stableman perked up, as if he had only just realized. “That does sound bad,” he said. “I’ll check on her.”

“Good idea.”

“How much would it take?” the stableman said, hands in his pockets, wearing his hat. He was chewing on a toothpick. “To get her to…reprogram one of those Striders for me?”

“For you?” Nil said. He had his hair knotted off at the back of his neck, but he was still warm. The air was getting muggy. Together, they walked to the gray barn where the cow moaned on and on. “I don’t think she would, honestly. Overriding a machine is not easy, and I don’t know that Aloy considers it a bounty she is willing to share.”

“Well, next time she’s in Meridian, bring her back around, will you? Can’t do any harm to ask.”

“Maybe,” said Nil.

They stood outside the barn, looking at the cow. There she was, with a baby calf hanging half out of her, just as Nil had surmised.

“Holy shit,” said stableman, rushing to the cow and rolling up his sleeves. “Where the fuck is my hand?” He began calling out for a boy named Anid. He called out over and over again. “Anid! Anid!”

Nil didn’t stay. It seemed too private.

He left the barn, and he walked a little ways. The air was balmy. The sun was almost down, flooding the sky in a purply red light. A young man in tall boots came running past, excusing himself and hollering at the stableman. He went into the barn, and Nil laughed as he heard the stableman shouting things about _responsibilities, Anid!_  and what it means to earn an honest day's pay, that cow producing her miracle all the while.

He kept walking around outside the city gates, looking at the little farms there. There were a lot more than there had used to be. When he was growing up, Nil only knew a couple of farmer’s sons and daughters. Most of the farms were out of sight, gated off and in valleys, safe from machines and bandits. But most of those seemed to have expanded, or moved in closer to the markets. The air smelled good, and every once in a while, he would look around and feel a strange absence. He did not worry about Aloy, not in a typical sense. He trusted that she could take care of herself, and that she did not need anyone to protect her. He was used to going long stretches without seeing her, and without knowing where she was or what kind of terrible danger she could be getting herself into. In this foreign land. So he was used to the uncertainty—the not knowing if he’d ever see her again, or if she would tire of him, and if that would be that. For a very long time, he expected this and nothing more.

Only now, things had changed a little, and this is what worried him, it seemed. It was harder. He felt a new anxiety in her absence. What if she didn’t come back? This meant something different now, now that he knew she planned to.

A little ways from the gate, Nil stopped in a pumpkin patch. The pumpkin patch was surrounded by a low, shoddy fence with a busted gate, and it was easy to get inside. There was an oddly shaped house nearby that looked to be made of lumpy clay. He wagered the pumpkin farmer was in there that very moment, taking an evening nap, and he smiled. He looked down once he was in there, and he noticed the little blue vines growing in all directions, covering his boots. He knelt down to touch the pumpkins, as they were big and majestic, orange and white and green. He picked one up, weighed it in his hands, and then he set it down again. He surveyed the quiet wisdom of the evening. Nil liked this time of year. The midnight parades, for as much as he tried to hide it, reassured him, and the vegetables were massive and strange.

But that is when Nil realized that he was not alone out here, in the pumpkin patch. He stood up, sensing a presence. He turned around, thinking he'd see the farmer, but he saw someone else altogether. Someone very unexpected. Blameless Marad, standing near the busted gate with a scroll of parchment clasped loosely in his hands. He was just as tall and proud as Nil remembered him from his youth. He got up and dusted his hands together. He cleared his throat and approached, with caution. Marad stood very still, smiling his good smile. When Nil got close enough to speak, he held out his hand.

“Brother Nil,” he said, his voice warm as always. He seemed incredulous that night, like he could not believe his eyes. “I thought my spies were telling me lies again. But it truly is you, staying in the Royal Maizelands after all these years.”

Nil switched his leather pack from one shoulder to the other. He looked Marad straight in the eye. He shook his hand, remaining clinical. “It’s me,” he said. "How can I help you?"

“I hear you arrived in town only yesterday with Aloy, is that true?”

“Yes.”

“And where is she now?” He looked around, earnest, expectant. “Is she near?”

“She is not,” said Nil. “She’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“Very well,” said Marad. He took a step closer. He was dressed in high fashion Carja silks and smelled of smoking tobacco. “How are you, Nil?”

“I get by,” said Nil. “How are you?”

“The same,” said Marad, still smiling. “My bones are not what they used to be, and the winter season makes me giddy for small town living. The city is filled with royal pomp, but I have always preferred the excitement and unfettered moonlight of the villages.”

“I agree.”

“It is good to be back.” He took a deep breath. He looked around. He looked at Nil. “Nil,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I am here—" He stopped short. He gathered his words. "I am here on behalf of Avad."

Nil sighed. It was all too expected.

“I am to deliver this.” The scroll in his hand, he gave it over. “It is an invitation to dine with him at the Palace of the Sun, tomorrow night.”

Nil took the scroll, gingerly between his fingers. The paper was dry and heavy, expensive. He did not open it. “A little last minute.”

“Yes,” said Marad. “But Avad heard that you spent the night inside the village, and he saw an opportunity, a sign that you might be more…amenable to talking. He wishes to waste no time.”

“He knows that Aloy is not here.”

“Aloy is not invited, Nil. It is just an invitation for one. You alone.”

Nil raised his eyebrows, unwilling. He flattened the invitation into a kind of rectangle and folded it into his pocket. “I see.”

“Avad is in a bad place,” said Marad, becoming serious, hands clasped loosely behind his back. “He is drinking, not sleeping normally. He mourns Ersa, but he will not allow himself to admit it. Nobody knew but me.”

“Makes sense.”

“Please come,” said Marad. “You can help, Nil. You know him best."

"Not anymore."

"I know he followed Aloy out to the river several days ago. I know that bothered you. He repents.”

“It bothered her,” said Nil. He shook his head. “I don’t speak for Aloy. She doesn’t need my protection.”

“I know that,” said Marad. “But how badly can it hurt, Nil? Giving him a chance to speak. You don't have to answer that. I may be overstepping, but I have to ask.”

Nil watched. He knew Marad, and he knew that Marad knew this would not work. The light in the air was desperate. In the distance overhead, you could see the hawks coming out of their castle nests for a twilight hunt. They perched, dove into the weeds, making loud, long screeching sounds. “You make a good case,” said Nil, shrugging his shoulders. “Then again, you always did.”

Marad drew defeated at this, as expected, but he smiled. He glanced down to his silk, embroidered shoes and where they met with the dirt in the pumpkin patch at dusk. He seemed sad. A sad, old man for just a moment, and it was strange, because he was otherwise always so—silvery. Powerful, poised. But not that day. Marad was a perpetually canny man. Calming in his demeanor, calculating but honorable. After Jiran’s war, he had testified on Nil’s behalf, negotiating for him a lighter sentence, due to what he branded “extraordinary circumstances.” He had known Nil’s mother from the time they were young. They had been very close, all the way up until the day she died. “I knew you would say that,” he said, a small grin. “Even still, give it some thought, Nil. You are, after everything, the stronger man.”

“I will do that,” said Nil.

“Thank you.”

He went off like a plain old man. Absent from his Palace, Blameless Marad held a sobered energy. His earlier confidence went away. But he was always savvy and there was something off about this, and Nil knew that he knew that they both could feel it. Avad was messed up. When he was a young teenager, he had used to shoot birds with his expensive hunting bow, and he’d use their feathers to fletch beautiful arrows for a little huntress who had used to live in the narrow streets of Meridian. Her father was a noble from a fishing family that had only just migrated in off the river, and Avad had eyes for her. Prince Avad always got what he wanted, but he always found a way to fuck it up. His father’s madness had put a strict and controlling nature into his soul. People and things in their places, and women most of all. Nil only knew a little about what went on in the Palace when they were growing up. King Jiran's _tough love._ Avad kept it a secret. As a young man, he grew to love women more than anything, as mothers, as lovers, and he treated them with sensitivity—so much so, one might say he was overcompensating. He was not an abusive man. Nil knew this. But Avad feared too much for their safety, and this made him a hovering, sheltering presence that no  _little huntress_ could ever come to trust. 

Nil wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been Avad who drove Ersa to take the chance that ultimately ended her life. He could not let go of control. It was a good trait for a King, Nil would give him that. But for everything else in his life, it was poison.

Nil reached around into his pack, found a pink apple that he had picked the day before with Aloy on the way back from the clearing. He shined it up on the hem of his shirt, took a bite, standing alone in the pumpkin patch.

“Hey!” said someone from the other side of the fence. It was a sleepy farmer holding a spear, wearing a big, stupid silk hat. “Get the fuck out of my pumpkins, outlander.”

Nil smiled at this. He was trespassing, after all. He nodded in apology, hopped the fence.

 

Somewhere not too far, but just far enough, Aloy had marked off a bit of territory just near to the jungle outcropping where she was set to meet Sylens. The ride had been fast. She hadn’t stopped for anything and it only took half a day. Now, she had her sleeves rolled up past her elbows as she pried into Dawn’s programming. She was doing a thing. Her fingers were stained with oil, and the oil of a Strider was not too strong, but it was quite blue, or black. It depended on the light, and it smelled like berries and rust. With her focus, and her spear, she could do most everything inside, like a computer. But sometimes, things were hardwired, and she had to reroute Dawn’s workings from the inside. She didn’t know how she’d come to this sort of aptitude so quickly with machines. It seemed born in her. She had let her hair get messy from the ride, and she was hungry, but it was still too much light in the air—dusk, but not quite night. She was early, and she knew that Sylens wouldn’t come until night.

“Here,” she said. She fed Dawn an apple core. Dawn was awake and calm, standing in a little tuft of clover the whole time Aloy worked. She was quiet and made little buzzing noises, trusting. She seemed to feel nothing of this. “This is going to be how it is now. It’s all going to be okay,” said Aloy.

Unwilling to duplicate Sickle’s programming, Aloy had started from scratch, and she added a couple of new variables. She wanted Dawn to be able to recognize Nil, and to have better instincts, keeping her out of trouble. A Strider wasn’t a fighting machine. It wasn’t supposed to be aggressive or mean. It was supposed to be cooperative, in the right situations, and to flee in the wrong. She synced her maps with Dawn’s maps so that they both knew and saw the world and its organization in the same exact way. Anything Aloy adjusted, Dawn adjusted, and should they ever become separated, as long as Aloy was wearing her focus, Dawn would be able to find her—wherever she may be. Dawn knew where Meridian was, and the Royal Maizelands now. Aloy had programmed their ride to be duplicable. She didn’t know what kind of shit she was about to get into here, and how much danger was in store, so she set a timer—12 hours. If Aloy did not check in on her focus before twelve hours time, Dawn was programmed to return to the Maizelands immediately, and to find Nil.

By the time she finished, she wiped the sweat from her brow and closed Dawn up and left her system alone. Warmed by Aloy’s touch, Dawn nuzzled her on the hair and then made a sound like a sneeze and went back to eating. These were not things that Aloy had programmed, though she had opened certain doorways that she thought might make her more amenable to warmth and companionship. Aloy honestly didn’t know how it worked. She thought there must be something in there—something more than just a computer. She didn’t have the vocabulary yet to figure it out, but she knew that it was there.

She left Dawn at the bottom of a deep ravine, hidden silently in the trees. She’d cleared a little pack of Stalkers nearby and overrode a Sawtooth and its Grazer minions to keep watch over Dawn and the area surrounding. After what happened to Sickle, she wasn’t taking any chances. Aloy scaled the ravine and found the outcropping where she was instructed to wait. Up in the sky, the whole world was finally going dark, and she ate an apple she had saved from the morning, a walk with Nil. When she finished, she tossed the core to the earth and sat with her chin in her hands. She stoked her fire. The smoke got thicker. She heard no machine sounds, nothing suspicious nearby, not even Glinthawks, and this in and of itself was fishy. It was about an hour after sunset when Sylens finally appeared.

When he did, Aloy sighed, her armor itchy. She had been waiting a long time, scratching at the curly hair at her temples and already feeling very done. “Sylens,” she said, annoyed as fuck. “How nice of you to finally drop by.”

“Hello, Aloy,” he said, smiling. He looked brazen, and this was annoying. He was a hologram, but still. A brazen hologram. Even as he flickered in and out of existence, he felt as real as you or me. He gave her a long look, too. Judging. “I should say the same to you.”

“I've been here for hours, waiting for you, Sylens.”

"What is the value of an hour against the span of weeks? It is about time you showed up here.”

“What are you talking about?"

“You know exactly what I'm talking about," he said. “It's been nearly a month. I expected you weeks ago. I thought you wanted the truth.”

“I do want the truth.”

“Then perhaps it is time you stop letting your personal life take priority over our work," he said. "A Carja war criminal with a penchant for disappearance and betrayal is the last thing you need on your plate right now. Every moment you spend with him is a moment lost to our cause.”

"Fuck you," she said. She leaned in and felt hot. She wanted to choke him. “You don’t know anything about what I need, Sylens. You're not my father. You're a hologram. And an asshole.”

“Exactly right,” he said, unemotional. She watched him study the palm of his hand, then return his attention to her. “I am ready.”

“So am I,” said Aloy.

"Good."

“So get the fuck out of my business, and tell me what I have to do.”

He took a deep breath, agitated. But he was trying to be stoic there, pulsating. He resigned to her anger. “Our purpose here tonight is to crash the focus network,” he said. “Enabling you to enter Sunfall undetected. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“To do this, you’ll first need to infiltrate the Eclipse’s main base. I’ve brought you around the back way. It’s right through there.” He gestured to a fat crevice in the rock. It looked odd, like it tapered into nothing. It was overgrown with weeds.

“The fucking back way?” said Aloy. “To their _main base_?”

He smiled. “Yes. Once you reach the main base, you'll see the objective—a derelict Tallneck that’s been extensively…modified.”

“Modified? How?”

“Climb the Tallneck," he said, ignoring her. "Grafted to the top of its disc you’ll find a sort of…module. Destroy that, and the Focus Network will crash.”

The wind kicked up, feeling damp. There was a sudden moisture in the air, like rain on the horizon. "It'll crash."

"Indeed."

“How do you know this, by the way? And how do you know about the Tall Neck?”

"That is not your concern.”

“Were you a part of the Eclipse?” said Aloy. She stood, worked up again, looking down at him. Or, looking down at the feeling of him. The cold image. “How am I supposed to trust you when you can’t tell me where you’re getting your information. When it sounds like you used to be in league with the enemy.”

“I’ve never been in league with anything,” said Sylens, bristling. He stood now, too. He was much taller than her, but Aloy was used to looking up at much older men who she was meant to follow.

“Bullshit.”

“There was a time when I assisted the Eclipse before learning of their true path,” he said, adjusting the wrappings on his knuckles, “but it was a mistake. I serve my own interests, Aloy. I always have. Perhaps we’ll get what we want out of all this if you consider doing the same.”

“Fuck off,” she said. She spat into the weeds. “Don't make this about me.”

Sylens smiled again. It was cold and mean but she needed him. She hated herself. She thought about where she could be now instead, in her whole stupid life. She thought about Rost.

“It is time,” he said.

“Good,” said Aloy.

“Try not to fail.”

She laughed, half-assed and rolled her eyes as she took a whetstone from her pocket and began to sharpen her spear. He watched for a moment, but he didn’t say anything more. He flickered once and disappeared.

Once he was gone, she took a deep breath to get rid of her anger. She stamped out the fire till the coals went black. She put the whetstone back into her pocket. She fixed her braids. She tightened the leather around her waist and around her shoulders and she adjusted her bow and her spear and how they held heavily on her back. Then she breathed, breathed, closing her eyes, breathed, closing herself.

She almost started to cry. She felt soft, but it wasn’t new. It was just closer to the surface now than it had ever been. She didn't know why. She stifled her sobs into the back of her gloved hand and continued to breathe. She didn't cry. She went into the crevice.

Sometimes, before killing the bandits, Aloy would look at Nil, and she would feel inside him the same sense of abandon and vengeance that she felt inside herself at terrible times like this. Sometimes, in quieter moments when it was just the two of them, picking apples in an orchard somewhere deep in the canyons outside Meridian, she would look at Nil and see the stars and the moon, and a man of sharp poetry, so soft inside, he was barely upright, held together by nothing but words and his wholesome memories of a home that no longer existed. 

Which was the one she needed?

It would take an entire evening of grinding her bones to dust in this haunted hell in the middle of a rock formation in the Sundom, a lot of bad things happening, but she would know. Tape recordings filled with a psychopath's dramas. Helis's fucked up marriage. His poor wife, lying naked on the kitchen floor just to please him, to prove she could handle the bloodless, the cold, destitute. Brainwashed, or maybe just as crazy as he was, she earned her keep at his side. Blood. Shouting. An arrow in a bad man's throat. Unconsciousness. Getting lost and feeling her heart abandon her chest, clawing the wet sand to escape the devil in the voices. But by the end of all this, she would open her eyes and see Nil, and she would know. Which was the one she needed? Vengeance and fire in the shadows, or lying on his back in the cool shade of an apple tree. Even if she didn’t really know, on the surface of her thoughts, she would fuckin figure it out. 

_Both._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am sorry for the long wait on this one! I had a lot of life things happen this month. But I'm still writing and on track for more. <3 
> 
> -gala


End file.
